Last time SQL Server downtime or data-loss occured, what happened? [closed]

Solution 1:

Other that the classic "I forgot to include the WHERE clause and I wasn't inside a transaction" update/delete statement?

Kept getting the databases on one server going offline in our lab environment. The drive the MDB files lived on would just disappear, SQL would hiccup, and I'd need to manually bring the databases back online when the drive re-appeared (usually a few minutes later) Spent the better part of a week with the ops guys to try and determine why the drive was going away. It was a LUN on the SAN, with redundant paths to the switch.

Long story short, turned out the fiber cables weren't fully clicked into their ports on the switch, and the cables had shifted during some recent maintenance. They now rested in the cavity between the rack door and the recess it closes into. When the door closed, it pulled on the cables just enough to cause the plugs to ride out and break connection. The door wasn't locked, just swinging freely, and when the door to the lab was opened/shut, the air movement caused the rack door to swing back and forth.

Solution 2:

At a small company I was at we had just roled out a basic Sharepoint Services site. We were small but our emplyees were around the world so the web access & MS Office intergration for Sharepoint was amazing (everything else sucked but thats another story) Since we didn't have much money and we were small we kept it simple, one SQL server with RAID and one web server also with RAID. About 1 week and 5 gigs of project data into it the power supply failed in the SQL box. We had a day of downtime waiting for delivery of the new one. We could have rolled the backups onto another server, but since we were still new to sharepoint the DR plan was still in development and we figured it would take as long to figure it all out as it would to just wait for the power supply to arrive, and since we know as soon as we had a new power supply we'd be online and not have to failback we just opted to wait and not risk messing up sharepoint.