Chad Callihan restores an elephant one bite at a time…or something:
The larger a database grows, the more difficult it becomes to restore it in a timely manner. When a database is young, you might be able to manage full restores in seconds. But as it matures and backup sizes go from megabytes to gigabytes to terabytes, those restore times will expand as well.
If you plan ahead, it’s not always a requirement to restore the entire database if only part of the database is necessary. This is where the idea of piecemeal restores can save you time and wasted effort.
I’ve always found piecemeal database restoration more of an interesting idea than something quite practical. The problem is, if your data is so easily separable that you can restore one set and not need the other for some reasonable length of time, why are they in the same database? I understand that there are reasonable answers to this question, but I also rarely see those scenarios pop up.