Introduction
We've pretty much wrapped-up this series on how to recover data from tables which had been accidentally dropped, and for which no backup exists.
So far, we’ve created a stored procedure with which to extract a hexadecimal dump of a specified page (Part 1), identified which pages contained data from which tables (Part 2), parsed each page into individual records (Part 3), parsed those records (which were still in raw hexadecimal form) into individual columns to create a standard SQL Server rowset (Part 4), and generated the record-parsing code dynamically for a table with an arbitrary structure (Part 5).
This final part will discuss how to cope when you don't know the structure of the table you're trying to recover. As the meta-data (column names, types, etc.) will have been lost when the table was dropped, and as there isn't a way to recover that meta-data (which I know of), we'll have to guess it. This post is about that guess-work.
This Might Not Work
All of the previous posts in this series were describing the steps I'd taken to recover some dropped tables. They were describing a process I knew worked because I'd used it to recover 10GB or so of data. This post is different. I plan to guess the structure of a table and write about it as I go. This means that when I make mistakes (which I will) you'll get to read about them. In fact, it might be that I can't recover this data because I can't work out the table structure. We'll have to wait and see.