That alone should make you reconsider
the use of filegroups.
In this chapter, I??™ll review the benefits filegroups provide, how to back up and restore
individual data files, how to back up and restore a filegroup, and new SQL Server 2005
improvements to filegroup functionality.
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C H A P T E R 4
A Brief Review of Filegroups
As you??™ve already seen, a database is made up of two or more files. At a minimum, it must
include one primary data file (normally with an .mdf extension) and one transaction log
file (.ldf). If more space is needed, you may add secondary data files to the database
(.ndf is the standard file extension). A database also contains one or more filegroups,
which contain one or more data files (.mdf and .ndf). Remember that while a database
can have more than one .ldf file, log files are not associated with a specific filegroup but,
rather, with each individual database.
Creating Filegroups
Unlike most database objects, there is no CREATE statement for filegroups, because they??™re
part of the structure of a database. Filegroups and additional files are created either when
a database is first built or later via an ALTER DATABASE statement.
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