I wrote an editorial for Database Weekly recently talking about the need to verify advice you get online. After all, those with even the best of intentions get things wrong at times. People answering questions might be doing what has worked for them to apparently solve a problem, but not really understand why, or they might not realize that their situation is not the same as that of the poster.
I was thinking about how to address this with SQLServerCental, and what changes we might make. We are considering altering our forums to allow some different types of markings for answers, but all the ideas we have take considerable development, so I'm not sure we'll make changes soon.
But in the meantime, it's Friday, and I thought I'd ask this question:
What's the worst SQL Server advice you see regularly?
I'm sure there are lots of things out there, and this might end up being a good discussion to pass along to those Accidental DBAs to learn from. So let us know what bad advice you see regularly and then what should be done.
I mentioned running repair with DBCC in my other editorial, but shrinking the database after an index rebuild is another piece of advice that I see people give out. That's a horrible one because it undoes all the index rebuilding work you did, or at least a good portion of it.
I have more, and I expect to see some of the experts out there building some blog posts that we can reference in our answers as well.
Steve Jones
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