DBCC CHECKDB Alternative to Repair SQL Server Database Corruption

Written By Nimisha Ramesh

Approved By Mack John

Published On January 19th, 2024

Reading Time 4 Minutes Reading

Understand DBCC CHECKDB Alternative

Need for an alternative to DBCC CHECKDB: DBCC CHECKDB must be implemented while the database is online however; it is suggested that there is negligible activity on the SQL Server during this operation. It does not attain table locks by default. Instead, it gains schema locks that prevent metadata changes but permit data changes. The schema locks developed will prevent the user from receiving an exclusive table lock essential to build a clustered index, truncate the table, drop an index, etc. With the latest version of DBCC CHECKDB, it makes CHECKTABLE, CHECKALLOC, and CHECKCATALOG with the one command rather than executing the commands separately. These commands run in a linear fashion.

Therefore, it is a full database consistency check, looking at page allocation on disk, checking and safeguarding that the page structures are correctly linked, and finally checks the system tables. This post is aimed to discuss about DBCC CHECKDB Alternative available & ways to reduce its Impact & DBCC CHECKDB error.

Ways to Reduce Impact of DBCC CHECKDB

There has been an increasing demand among users for DBCC CHECKDB Alternative to Check Database Integrity & Repair SQL Server Database Corruption.

Reduce I/O Impact: optimize tempdb

DBCC CHECKDB can make the heavy usage of tempdb therefore, to make sure that the plan for the utilization of resources is there. There is a good thing for doing it in such a case. For CHECKDB, users need to allocate space for tempdb and then, check the progress for CHECKDB and wait for an auto grow. If the one is using trace flag 2562 then, be sure in accommodating for additional requirements of space.

Reduce I/O impact: Snapshot Control

In a way to run CHECKDB, modern editions of SQL Server will try to create hidden snapshot of database on the similar drive. Then, it is difficult to control this mechanism, but if it is required to control, where CHECKDB operates and makes its own snapshot first on whatever drive is needed and run DBCC command against the snapshot.

Reduce I/O impact: Avoid Errors 665/1450/ 1452

There are errors for reducing the error risk while using CHECKDB operation and reducing its impact via various fixes that are present depending on the OS and SQL edition. Apart from that you can use below mentioned methods which are possible alternative to dbcc checkdb.

Reduce CPU Impact

DBCC CHECKDB is multi-threaded by default. If your machine is CPU-bound and you need to CHECKDB to utilize less CPU while running longer then, consider reducing parallelism in way of different ways. Use better quality of CPU that has been rapidly denied.

Alternative to DBCC CHECKDB

DBCC CHECKDB Alternative 1

An alternative is to run a DBCC CHECKDB on other SQL Server. You can setup a procedure where you can restore database on other server and run DBCC CHECKDB against it. Since the DBCC CHECKDB backup procedure is a bit-by-bit copy of database, upon restoring database it will be in same state as online database. If the database is inconsistent or there are storage problems then, the backup will store these too. As such, the results of any likely corruption should surface on restore. This will eliminate the IO issue on the production server. However, backup, copy or restore procedure could be quite lengthy, and will need the correct amount of disk space for database accommodation.

DBCC CHECKDB Alternative 2

There is a software namely SQL Database Recovery that makes easy or users to recover all their SQL database in an efficient way & an excellent alternative to DBCC CHECKDB . The application is designed in such a way that it makes easy for users to perform the process in an efficient and less time. The tool can easily repair corrupt SQL database within few clicks. It supports all Windows as well as SQL server editions.

Conclusion

The reality is that although we search for ways to decrease the performance overhead when running DBCC CHECKDB, there is NO way for running consistency checks on database without I/O impact. In the above discussion, we have discussed some DBCC CHECKDB Alternative to be utilized easily.