If you work, or have worked, in a shop with lots of SQL servers then you either have, or will, experience an issue with storage. Like for instance you’re storage controllers go down, knocking down your SQL instances. As we all know, this is a good way to corrupt databases. That’s why Sys Admins should never just hit the power button on a database servers, but I digress.

I’ve recently encountered this problem recently, a couple of times in fact. While weekly DBCC checks are run, I was tasked with a way to check lots of databases for corruption quickly. It was decided that we would only do a physical check with DBCC, the databases should be under 1GB in size, and we wanted to be able to run the query across multiple servers quickly. Obviously the size of the database can be modified.

I came up with this.

--create table variable

declare @dbcc_physical Table (
 name varchar(50) not null
);

-- select database names who are under 1GB in size, and store in table variable
INSERT INTO @dbcc_physical
SELECT name from sys.master_files
WHERE type = 0 
AND size < 1024
AND name != 'modeldev';


-- create dynamic sql to execute dbcc check
DECLARE @tableCursor CURSOR,
@databaseName VARCHAR(100);

SET @tableCursor = CURSOR FOR SELECT * FROM @dbcc_physical;

OPEN @tableCursor;
FETCH NEXT FROM @tableCursor INTO @databaseName;
WHILE(@@FETCH_STATUS = 0)
BEGIN;
EXECUTE ('DBCC CHECKDB(' + @databaseName + ') WITH PHYSICAL_ONLY;');

FETCH NEXT FROM @tableCursor INTO @databaseName
END;
 
CLOSE @tableCursor;
DEALLOCATE @tableCursor;