Our agency is just now upgrading from SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2008 R2. I took this change as an opportunity to finally read your book. And I couldn't be more grateful. Thank you! for taking the time to write it.

******************

QUESTION:

Maintenance of our server has been a discipline that has grown in fits and starts over the years. After reading your book, I realized that we are missing a rather important piece: Other than setting up a Clean Up History task (if that counts), I do not think we are doing anything to maintain the system databases. I volunteered to take on this piece.

What isn't clear to me, is what the best practices for maintaining system databases would be. I'm not confused about frequency, but about which maintenance tasks apply to system databases. The book mentions that practices would be different for system vs user databases, but all the examples appear to be for user databases.

This entry in SQL Server Central seems to say that only backing up and doing a database check are what are needed for system databases. I did a search on the internet to try to get this question answered and found two conflicting answers, both by MVPs, on this topic.

My question is: Do I understand you correctly about only needing the 2 tasks (backup and check db) for maintaining system DBs? And if so, why wouldn't one also rebuild indexes?

Thanks again for providing this book. I doubt I would have been able to read it any other way.