It’s not the first Monday of October, instead it’s the second Tuesday (oops, had Wednesday in here originally). As we are all busy from time to time, last week’s post managed to slip my mind. I was wrapped up with preparing for a birthday and Parallel Data Warehouse training.
Many of you, though, are probably in a similar boat. Not with last week, but with this week. Today is the first day of PASS Summit 2013, the largest annual SQL Server conference. But while you are out, how confident are you that your backups, performance, or any other possible environment haphazard won’t pull you away from the conference. I’ve seen this time and again, attendees sitting in the halls on phones and laptops trying to get their environments back to work; while they are spending thousands of dollars in training and knowledge that they can bring back to their day to day careers.
One thing that any DBA can, and should, be doing is monitoring their environment day to day and month to month. Many daily outages are the results of conditions that have deteriorated over months of neglect. Take the time to find out what is going on in your environment and see the problems that are coming while they are still symptoms. It’s very similar to dealing with “high blood pressure” in your environment before it has a “heart attack”.
To get started, you should make a checklist of the things that are going on in your environment and start tracking them month to month. If you don’t already have your own checklist, check out the SQL Server Monthly Checklist that I provide on this blog. It covers most everything that should be checked. If you see anything missing from that list, please leave a comment on this post. And if there are good resources out there that should be included on the list – share those as well.
Checklist Updates
There are just a couple changes to the checklist since last month, these updates include:
- Added cumulative update for SQL Server 2012 SP1
- Added cumulative update for SQL Server 2008 SP3
If you have time to take a look at it, the SQL Server 2012 Product Guide to see how you can use SQL Server in your environment.
SOMETHING MISSING?
Is there something missing in this checklist or with the pages that has been overlooked? Any cool links that would aid in the review of your SQL Server environments? If so, leave a comment below and I’ll take a look.
