Quickest recovery option for recovering data from an SQB

stevengupta

Last week I had the need to recover data from a 100GB SQB as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, I did a lengthy restore.
Which worked but took a lot longer than I would have liked.
I discovered a restore object option, but this seemed to get stuck on "Parsing" and seemed like it would take just as long as a restore.

I am looking for suggestions on the quickest way to recover a DB or DB objects from a backup.
Is it possible to "mount" or attach an SQB file?

sam.blackburn

If you need to inspect backups often, you might want to check out SQL Clone which can restore multi-terabyte databases in just a few seconds.  It works by creating an image file (this first step is slow) and then uses filesystem tricks to rapidly restore as many copies of the database as you want.

The "restore single object" feature of SQL Backup uses the same underlying technology as SQL Compare and Data Compare, which can basically parse the backup file to infer the database contents. This is about as close to "mounting" a backup file as you can get without involving SQL Server.  Its performance mostly depends on the complexity of your schema rather than the data size, so a 100GB backup with only a few tables should parse in just a few seconds, but a smaller database with 1000 tables will take several minutes.  There are also a lot of newer SQL Server features that aren't supported by this parsing method, such as encryption and compression.

Hope this helps!

stevengupta

I was reading up on SQL Clone earlier, unfortunately for me I think the licensing costs might get in the way of that method.