SQL Server Backup and Restore - Simple Talk

How do we know it worked?
Chapter 4: Restoring From Full Backup
Let's run a few quick queries, shown in Listing 4-1, against our newly restored
DatabaseForFullBackups database to verify that the data that we expect to be here is
actually here.
USE [DatabaseForFullBackups]
GO
SELECT MessageData ,
COUNT(MessageData) AS MessageCount
FROM MessageTable1
GROUP BY MessageData
SELECT MessageData ,
COUNT(MessageData) AS MessageCount
FROM MessageTable2
GROUP BY MessageData
Listing 4-1: Checking our restored data.
The first query should return a million rows, each containing the same message. The
second query, if everything worked in the way we intended, should return no rows.
Collecting restore metrics
Having run the full backup, in Chapter 3, we were able to interrogate msdb to gather
some metrics on how long the backup process took. Unfortunately, when we run a restore
process using SSMS, there is no record of the length of the operation, not even in the SQL
Server log files.
The only way to capture the time is to script out the RESTORE command and run the
T-SQL. I won't show this script here, as we're going to run a T-SQL RESTORE command
very shortly, but if you want to see the stats for yourself, right now, you'll need to
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