Very interesting recent post from Brad McGehee on RedGate’s Virtual Restore which enables you to “Rapidly mount live, fully functional databases direct from backups”:
In brief, what SQL Virtual Restore does is to mount a SQL Server backup to a SQL Server instance as a fully functional, live database. In other words, the mounted database works exactly like any other database from SQL Server’s perspective, except the data, for the most part, is stored in a backup file
This has many uses, as Brad mentions in his post.