Recovering A Database With Only The MDF File: These Are Your Options

Hello out there and welcome back to SQL Something!

This is one of a few blog posts I had time to complete and post (busy times). Without further ado, let's get started.

This post was inspired by a recent event where we lost the drive that our log files were on (not gonna go into the gory details about that).
Thankfully, prior to this we knew hardware weirdness was going on with the server so we moved all our production DBs to our secondary server. Whew.
Thus, losing the drive on what was formerly the production server wasn't that bad. And it then gave me some MDF files to attempt to restore at my leisure, just for trying sake.

Remove a Database from Single User Mode

Hey everybody! Welcome back to SQL Something.

It’s been a long week but still trying to stick to my self-imposed rule of having one post per week. Here’s a simple one on how to remove Single User Mode from a DB.

Fig. 1: What a DB looks like in Single User Mode in Management Studio.

 

From my readings and my experience it seems a DB could go into single user mode in order to prevent corruption after some form of incorrect action was taken, whether purposefully or not. This recently happened to me when I tried to purposefully break replication. I tried to delete a DB while it was publishing, it then threw an error and curled up in a fetal position in single user mode. Poor little guy.

So how do we take a DB out of Single User Mode? We can try the following: