Monthly Archives: October 2010

How Often Do You Run CHECKDB Against Your Databases?

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I recently ran a poll, asking DBAs how often they ran DBCC CHECKDB against their databases. Compared to some of the polls I have run recently, I was somewhat pleasantly surprised by the results.

My first pleasant surprise was that at least 90% of those polled knew what DBCC CHECKDB was. This is a good sign that most DBAs have at least a basic understanding of database maintenance best practices.

Of the 90% of the DBAs who run DBCC CHECKDB against their databases, just about 27% of them do it on a daily basis. These must be very diligent DBAs who take their roles of “protectors of the organization’s data” very seriously, and I commend them.

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When Times are Tough, Do You Rise to the Occasion?

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This is a reprint of my editorial in Database Weekly.

Scenario One: The new third-party application, purchased by your company without your involvement, is performing poorly on SQL Server. As the DBA, you are getting a lot of flak from users and management, but your hands are severely tied as to what you can do to fix the problem.

Scenario Two: The IT budget has been cut, one DBA position has been lost, and the money promised to replace your aging hardware is nowhere to be seen. And, by the way, you now have to take over all the duties that the laid off DBA used to do.

When faced with difficult times such as these, what do you do? Do you:

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SQL Server Database Maintenance Checklist

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In this blog post, I continue my series of SQL Server Health Checklists that I am developing for a new book I am writing. The focus of this checklist is database maintenance.

Database maintenance includes a defined set of proactive tasks that a DBA needs to perform on a periodic basis to help ensure that their databases perform optimally and maintain high availability. In many cases, the individual maintenance steps taken might not, by themselves, seem all that important, but the accumulative effect of performing  database maintenance tasks can be huge.

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