Richie Lee announces a tool to make log shipping more powerful:
To resolve this, you can restore files under NORECOVERY, then switch to STANDBY: when restoring a log backup, you have two restore choices: NORECOVERY and STANDBY. Both these choices will allow further log restores, but STANDBY is the option to choose if you want the database to be read-only. NORECOVERY leaves the database in a transactionally inconsistent state: it does not roll back uncommitted transactions into a tuf file. So it is possible to restore the log files in NORECOVERY mode, and then restore a final log with the STANDBY option to enable the database to be read-only (it is pretty neat that you can switch between STANDBY and NORECOVERY in this way.) We can do this because we honestly don’t care about all those in-between restores being transactionally consistent. Sadly, this option is not an out-the-box operation, and so requires writing a custom job to restore the log files. I’ve read online a few methods to achieve this, and I have written my own custom restore process.
Check out Richie’s project on GitHub.