It’s been a bit since I did one of these so let’s go back to the basics. Best practices. We all know they exist and probably know at least a few. A while back I talked about the fact that best practices change over time. Turns out they also change rather dramatically depending on your environment. Kendra Little (blog|twitter) recently posted a discussion of index maintenance on Azure SQL DBs and Managed Instances and how the best practices should be somewhat different than on-premises.
Obviously cloud enviornments have their own unique requirements but even when on-premises things are changing. Storage is getting faster and bigger, and memory and CPUs are more plentiful than ever before. Is it any wonder that best practices are going to change?
So this month take a look at your best practices. Start with some research. What are considered the curent best practices. I’ll give you a hint too. Not all of it is going to be what Microsoft says (blasphamy!). Look at what other DBAs out there are doing and what they are finding to work the best. Kendra’s post above for example. Then take a look for any anti-patterns in your code, review your maintenance plans (FYI I mean your plans for maintenance, not actual maintenance plans. Don’t use those.), your backup plans and schedule, and last but certainly not least, check your instance and database settings. Make sure all of it makes sense given your current setup. Far too often things get put in place and forgotten about for years. And of course last but not least make plans to update what you are doing with the current best practices. This should include testing and figuring out if the best practice is what’s best for you.