I have a 25TB db (SQL2008 Enterprise SP4) that appears to not have had CHECKDB run on it in production. No idea if it was run against a restored backup somewhere at sometime. Right now I don't have space to restore a copy on another server connected to the same storage.
I need to be able to run checkcatalog, checkalloc and checktable but even for small tables it doesn't appear to be able to create the internal sparse file dbcc snapshot.
So I was wondering if I can create a SQL database snapshot on another drive and then run those commands against that and then drop the snapshot db once complete.
Thanks!
–Todd
Best Answer
I think Robert Davis answered your question in two posts:
How to manually create a database snapshot and get SQL Server to use it for CHECKDB:
http://www.sqlsoldier.com/wp/sqlserver/day1of31daysofdisasterrecoverydoesdbccautomaticallyuseexistingsnapshot
Performance comparison of CHECKTABLE commands run against database vs manually created snapshot w/ different options:
http://www.sqlsoldier.com/wp/sqlserver/day15of31daysofdisasterrecoveryrunningdbccchecktableinparalleljobs