Rodrigo Riberio Gomes digs in:
In more than 10 years of experience, I have dealt with cases where someone has performed incorrect operations on a table, such as updating or deleting wrong rows, in a SQL Server database that does not have full backups available. There are multiple reasons for no full backup: corrupted backups, taking too much time to restore, etc.
In this post, I want to show an alternative for these cases, an ace up one’s sleeve, that you can use to recover data. This method also provides a deep understanding of the internal workings of how your SQL Server stores data. So, in addition to learning how to recover data, you will gain more insights into the internals of SQL.
Read on to see how. Rodrigo also points out some limitations or things that would need to change if you have index compression. I consider this a very neat thing you might need to know but never want to use.