This tutorial shows six different ways that you can create database backups using SQL Server and T-SQL.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. Let’s learn how to restore a SQL Server database backup for Microsoft SQL Server. Restoring is a method of copying data from a backup and applying logged transactions to the data. Restore is basically taking a database backup and turning it back into a database. There are different procedures of restoring a database backup which include using T-SQL code, SQL Server Management Studio, or third-party applications. This article will not dive into how backups are taken but you should at least be aware that backups are taken purposely to be restored when the database becomes corrupt or crashes, migrating the database, making a copy of the database, and other business requirements. In this crash course, we will be focusing mainly on how to restore using the T-SQL code. There is the assumption that the backup for the database is readily available and the file location is known. We also have permission to access the file/directory as long as there are no corruption or disk issues with the backup file. Also, during the restore process of the database, you will need exclusive access to the database, which means no other user connections can connect to the database. Finally, the version of the database cannot be greater than the version of the SQL Server that backup needs to be restored on. For example, you cannot restore a database with version 130 (SQL Server 2016) on a SQL Server 2012 or version (110). Learn more here. RESTORE DATABASE is a very common and universal T-SQL command to restore SQL Server backups since the language works in almost any environment or tool that understands it. Therefore, you can execute them in SQL Server Management Studio, SQLCMD utility, or any other third-party tool. The RESTORE DATABASE command is mainly used you to restore either a full, differential, file, or filegroup backup. We are going to look at the methods to restore different backups and other options that can be applied to the restore command process. First, let’s start with the most common restore of a full backup. These backups contain all information needed to restore your database to the point in time when the backup process had finished.
