David Fowler fixes a large-scale oopsie:
“Could you help me, we deleted the database’s transaction log file and now that database is stuck in ‘Recovery Pending’?”
This was a panicked call that I received a few weeks ago.
“Sure, no problem” said I, “we’ll have to restore back to your last backup”
And then things went silent for a while before the inevitable, “it’s only a development database, we don’t take backups”.
I can feel the face-palm from here. Read on to learn what you can do if you’re in that situation, as well as David’s important note about taking backups so that you don’t end up in this situation to begin with.