I was reading an article the other day on spring cleaning, talking about all that data that is out there in the world, on people's machines, and is taking up space, with almost no chance of being used again. It's seems that storage is constantly a battle for many people, trying to decide how much to keep, how much to delete, and if the cost of storing something is worth it.
This article is written for the end user, but it could be applied to servers as well. Especially database servers where we are constantly adding more data, and at increasing rates over time. For this Friday, I wanted to ask a poll question related to managing your servers.
Do you perform spring cleaning?
I'm wondering are there any types of annual maintenance that you perform to manage space and storage, perhaps archiving or removing old data, or even deleting data that might not be needed.
It's been years since I worked at a company where we performed any kind of maintenance. In most of the systems I managed in the last decade, the databases have been so small, and storage capacities growing so fast, that we never deleted anything. In fact, we often captured data that we knew we wouldn't use, but we didn't stop because we didn't need to.
I have tended to come down on the side of "save everything" you can, but I realize that as your company grows, and as users keep more and more data around, you can have serious scalability issues with servers. Usually file servers or Exchange servers, but I can certainly see database servers costing lots of money as we store more types of data in there from various portals and applications.
Let us know this Friday if you perform maintenance, and if so, what kind.
Steve Jones
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