Another key component of any good maintenance plan is updating statistics. Statistics are what help the SQL Server optimizer choose the best execution plan for your queries. Let your stats get too far out of date, and watch your query performance tank.

For me, the biggest shortcoming of the update… Read more

As good little DBAs, we should be gathering baseline statistics for our database servers. These stats can give us insight into what’s changed when performance is suddenly in the toilet. They can also provide a basis for determining what systems can be consolidated, downsized, or virtualized, which has become quite… Read more

In response to my last post, I got a very interesting comment from Philip:

“I would love to see a way to add logic that will verify at least X backup files for a given DB remain. Specifically, in my organization, I would like to delete all but the most…

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I’ve covered creating my backup directories and the actual backup of the database(s). The last thing I want to do in my process is clean up any old backup files. Once again, I want to allow for some flexibility in my procedure. Much… Read more