Reading SQL Server File Headers with DBCC FILEHEADER

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I’ve been doing a deep dive into SQL Server on-disk structures lately, and one of my favorite rabbit holes is revisiting Paul Randal’s series on file header pages. If you haven’t read it, go do that now. It covers what file header pages are, what they contain, and what happens when they corrupt. This post takes that concept and runs with it. I’ll use DBCC FILEHEADER to read the file header of every user database file on a server and answer a question that comes up more than you’d think: can you determine which files belong together as a database purely from the file header, without querying sys.databases?

DBCC on Anthony Nocentino's Blog

Reading SQL Server File Headers with DBCC FILEHEADER