Performing an online piecemeal restore

In this recipe, we will perform an online piecemeal restore.

Getting ready

We will use a test database called StudentDB database, which has three filegroups—one primary, two custom filegroups FG1 and FG2—in this recipe. Each of FG1 and FG2 will have one secondary datafile stored in the C:\Temp folder.

You can use the script 6464 - Ch05 - 11 - Perform an Online PieceMeal Restore - Prep.ps1 to create your files, which is included in the downloadable files for this book. When the script has finished executing, you should see the following database:

This is how the tables will be structured:

Table	Filegroup	Datafile name	Datafile location
Student_PRIMARY	PRIMARY	StudentDB.mdf	Default data directory
Student_FG1	FG1	Student_FG1_data	C:\Temp
Student_FG2	FG2	Student_FG2_data	C:\Temp
Student_TXN	PRIMARY	StudentDB.mdf	Default data directory

For our recipe, we will restore only the PRIMARY filegroup, and filegroup FG2...