Common SQL Database Corruption Errors, Causes and Resolutions

MS SQL Server database is one of the popular and advanced relational database management systems, which is largely used by organizations and professionals. The improved user interface and advanced features of SQL Server make it one of the best database management tools for managing a large amount of data. Despite the usefulness of this software, the databases created by it are prone to corruption, which results in the inaccessibility of all the data. Let us discuss some of the common reasons for the corruption of SQL database:

SQL Server Database Corruption Causes: SQL database can be damaged or corrupt due to various reasons, some of which are:

More than 95% of corruption happens due to hardware failure

• Bugs in SQL server itself
• Abrupt system shutdown while the database is opened
• Changes in SQL account
• Virus infection
• Upgrading SQL Server from previous versions to newer one also, at times, results in the corruption of the database.

Whatever the cause of corruption is, you cannot get to know about it until you access the damaged data. You get any of the below-mentioned error messages while trying to interact with corrupt data of your SQL database:

• Msg 823 error in SQL Server. Read more
• Msg 824 (I/O error) in SQL Server. Read more
• Msg 825 (read retry) in SQL Server.
• SQL Server Page Level Corruption. Read more
• SQL Server Table Corruption Error.
• Corruption on non-clustered indexes. Read more
• Database consistency errors reported by DBCC CHECKDB.
• Corruption on data pages. Read more
• Metadata corruption Error. Read more

Mentioned above is the list of common errors of SQL Server database corruption; however, there can be various other error messages for the same as well. In such situations, many will recommend you that backups are always the best way to restore data, which is not completely true. Backup is useful for some cases, but for the cases wherein you come across the corrupt database element very late, it does not work. This is because, by this time, corruption may have spoiled your backup as well. 

For such cases, use Stellar Repair for MS SQL is recommended. The SQL Recovery software repairs corrupt SQL database files and recovers tables, indexes, keys, rules, constraints, triggers, and defaults. The understandable user interface of this software makes it possible to recover various objects present in MDF and NDF database files without much effort.