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Posted by Nick Stansbury on 09/10/05 14:11
Hi,
Sorry for the obscure title but I'm afraid I can't think of a better
way to describe what happened to one of my clerks last night. The guy was
working late, made a series of changes (accross a number of tables with a
dependant relationship structure - i.e. a customer linked to an order linked
to an invoice linked to a payments etc.) Now when he came back this morning
none of the work he did last night was still there. I'm by no means a
sql-pro - but I've managed to make do so far. Here's what I know:
1) All of our records in all of our tables have date/time stamped. Once when
they go in and once when they're changed. So with a little work I can build
up a good picture of what usage our database gets at what times. I've pulled
up a query and there is a big fat hole between 8pm-10pm - stuff that
happened before that is still there, stuff that happened after that is still
there - but all the changes that were put in between then just aren't there
any more. So it's not just insertions but updates as well.
2) There is no perceivable break in our identity columns. So despite the
fact that I know he entered 7 new customers, I can go back through the
customers table and look at where those customers should sit visa vie entry
times - and it's just as though the customers he entered never existed -
sql server just keeps incrementing sequentially and there's no break - so
the last customer entered at about 6:50 pm was something like number 11912
and the customers entered this morning have numbers that carry on from
11913.
3) I'm running in a shared environment - the server is hosted by a
webhosting company (who shall remain nameless unless I can prove it's their
fault!) based in the US - the server has 100's of other Users databases
running on it.
I just don't know where to begin diagnosing this sort of problem. But it has
me really running scared. It's not the first time something like this has
happened to me (i've noticed it once before when I had to get a connection
killed by the people who manage our server because of a long-running query
that seemed to have just got bunged up and was locking a key table) - but
that was just a few records changed by the user who's connection got killed.
Nothing like this... but it's pretty scary - I've got no way of knowing that
I'm losing changes like this on a continuous basis. It's my worst
nightmare - like a pipe leaking underneath a floor board - and you only find
out when the water starts running down the stairs!
Has anyone got any ideas? Any starting places? Anyone else had anything like
this happen to them before?
Thanks
Nick
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