Thank you for the fine post. I have been a DBA for a long time (more than 26 years covering mainframe, unix, and Windows). In my earlier years, hierarchical databases with direct pointers was the only database used for large companies. A similar utility was employed to validate the pointers. Management complained constantly about the cost of running this utility. At one division of a previous company I worked for, the DBA heeded the management's advice and stopped running the utility. You can probably guess what happened. A corrupted control block started slowly to corrupt the database pointers until they could not ignore it. But by that time, they no longer had logs to go back to the previous backup and roll forward. They asked me for assistance and I told them that it is like running your car without car insurance. Yes, car insurance is expensive, but that goes with the cost of owning a car. I said I couldn't help them. They ended up having to restore the database and go back to the outside customers and beg them to resubmit their transactions. It was an embarrassment to the company. Perhaps this story will encourage DBAs to never neglect required maintenance -- and DBCC is required maintenance.