The first T-SQL Tuesday invite of 2025 comes from Rob Farley. Rob asks us to write about our experiences when it comes to integrity. Database integrity and personal integrity are both mentioned, and I had one situation come to mind from a while ago that may be an integrity one-two punch. If you haven’t read over the invite, click the T-SQL Tuesday logo to check it out.
What’s Right Isn’t Always Easy
Dozens of databases were being migrated to new servers during a tight early morning outage window. Jobs ran to grab a final transaction log backup from the old server and restore it on the new server. Everything seemed in order except for one particular database. For this database, which happened to be more active than most, the final transaction log backup and restore failed to complete. And for “reasons,” it was not an easy task to take a new backup quickly. The database was missing about 20 minutes of data.
20 minutes during peak times could be significant. 20 minutes off hours…probably not so much. The odds were good that nothing meaningful outside of the migration work had even occurred in those 20 minutes. It may have ended up being harmless to turn a blind eye and carry on with the migrations without that final backup. After all, there were other databases and migration steps to worry about, and again, the outage window was tight.
But as database administrators or any variation of the role, we’re entrusted with the data of our organization and clients. Knowingly ignoring 20 minutes (or any amount of time) goes against that trust and would be unacceptable. Not doing what’s necessary to migrate all data would be a compromise of both data integrity and personal integrity.
Handle With Care
Though it became a more stressful migration and took some additional work to get all data migrated, we completed the migration successfully. I didn’t go back and find out if the final backup made a difference. It didn’t matter. Turning a blind eye and simply hoping for the best is never an option.
Thanks for reading!
Chad Callihan 