At times, we end up with situations like databases suddenly goes into restoring state and becomes not accessible. Few cases those are valid like mirror database in a database mirroring or removed database from AlwaysOn etc. Today, we are not discussing about those valid cases, but as outcome of an incident or unfortunate db state change.

If you happened to see a database in restoring and you want to get it online, you can simply restore with recovery as below.

In most cases, the db would get online immediately. Sometimes, it might give you an error message as below:

Msg 4333, Level 16, State 1, Line 3 The database cannot be recovered because the log was not restored. Msg 3013, Level 16, State 1, Line 3 RESTORE DATABASE is terminating abnormally.

If you result with the above error message, then we should understand that the particular database is not restored in a proper way. May be. the restore process would have terminated due to network issues or cancelled the restore part way through etc. Such database cannot be brought online. The best way would be to drop the database and restore from the backup.

It is important to have a valid database available for us to quickly get this db online. So ensuring the backup is important as always, hope we all will have a good backup plan in place by default, if not, that should be the first priority item.

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