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I'm ready to shoot someone at this stage. I don't even know who to shoot, but I'm ready to.

We moved databases a couple months back. All 25 locations statewide consolidated down to one database. Glory be, etc. Standardization is awesome, all that.

Well, our migration went kind of rough and I spent a month putting things like hours, phone numbers, locations, etc. back into the database for each organization we have in it.

This month they tried to do an export to refresh the data on the public site we maintain for Joe Public to search.

Somehow this stripped out about 1/2 the hours and a handful of phone numbers from my data. Not just on the export file but on the actual damn file.

So I'm getting to to go through a few thousand records and re do what I did a couple weeks back.
I dont' know WTF is going on and the IT guys are trying to figure it out but I've had to remove myself from the email chain before I did something to get myself fired.

Restore your work from backups. Problem solved!

Sounds awful....

yeah, I wish. We can't do our own back up, and the exports ARE our backups. The do a full export, clean it up and simplify it for the public site and store a digital copy of the full export in a couple locations.

sounds like there is a bigger problem of access for morons to screw things up as well as lack of backups.

Man, I got a daily MSSQL dump script that runs plus transaction logs. It was pretty simple to set up in the SQL Management Studio. Do you use something similar? Or is this some crazy other db that no one knows how to maintain? I'm no db admin at all and I was able to figure 'er out.

paulWTAMU wrote:

yeah, I wish. We can't do our own back up, and the exports ARE our backups. The do a full export, clean it up and simplify it for the public site and store a digital copy of the full export in a couple locations.

Well, the above is a serious problem if this data is at all meaningful to your business. Backups are critical, in part to prevent exactly the sort of issue that you're dealing with right now. An export is not a backup; there are too many things that can go wrong as a part of an export.

What kind of a database are we talking about here, anyway? You mention in your OP that they somehow lost data in the exports and in the database itself?? That sounds awfully fishy to me.

someone forgot to type commit;

What type of databases are you dealing with? Though I guess it'd just be one now.
I may be able to offer some advice / tips - if not to recovering your data, at least to do a local backup 'just in case'
[I know this isn't an effective backup practice, it just guards against when someone hits the wrong switch and wipes out the db]

pikaporeon wrote:

someone forgot to type commit;

What type of databases are you dealing with? Though I guess it'd just be one now.
I may be able to offer some advice / tips - if not to recovering your data, at least to do a local backup 'just in case'
[I know this isn't an effective backup practice, it just guards against when someone hits the wrong switch and wipes out the db]

I second everything Pika says above. What DBMS?

Well, the above is a serious problem if this data is at all meaningful to your business. Backups are critical, in part to prevent exactly the sort of issue that you're dealing with right now. An export is not a backup; there are too many things that can go wrong as a part of an export.

What kind of a database are we talking about here, anyway? You mention in your OP that they somehow lost data in the exports and in the database itself?? That sounds awfully fishy to me.

You're telling me. All I know for sure is I can't do a back up restore from thiers because that's how it is in thier backup right now.

It's VisionLink OS. I don't know if it's technically actually a database because it's software for information and referral. But my part of it is maintaining a listing of agencies, and what programs and services they provide. IIRC it's done in XML but I could be wrong; honestly once it gets technical I get lost pretty quick.

We've had problems before with the data provider field (denotes what location provided the data) changing back and forth randomly too, and they're thinking it could be tied into a similar issue; I don't know how they resolved it that time but it has been stopped. IF that's the case it could have happened a few days to a couple weeks ago, and only been caught during the quality check when they tried to export--I don't go in and review records daily (although it isn't a bad idea, I may need to start doing that).
I'm hoping :X If I have to do this next month I'm going to scream.

Resolution! They apparently somehow reverted my location and one or two tohers to an older version of the data by accident.
I dont' know if i should be happy it's fixed or paranoid as hell that they managed to do that.

I will admit ignorance about Visionlink OS except for what I saw on their homepage.

It's a community OS, whatever that means. Doesn't seem to be an actual database, although a database could be whatever you call it...for example, I might call my spreadsheets "databases" (but that doesn't make them so, haha! ).

I suspect that Visionlink is either lacking in recovery capabilities when compared to a bonafide database such as SQL Server, Sybase, Oracle, DB2, or even "My SQL", or else the support staff may be lacking in recovery knowledge...

BIF wrote:

I will admit ignorance about Visionlink OS except for what I saw on their homepage.

It's a community OS, whatever that means. Doesn't seem to be an actual database, although a database could be whatever you call it...for example, I might call my spreadsheets "databases" (but that doesn't make them so, haha! ).

I suspect that Visionlink is either lacking in recovery capabilities when compared to a bonafide database such as SQL Server, Sybase, Oracle, DB2, or even "My SQL", or else the support staff may be lacking in recovery knowledge...

Hey no need to derisively separate MySQL... except that I don't trust Oracle to not run it into the ground (and prefer Postgres).