Disable or Drop

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Disable or Drop

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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January 11, 2018 at 8:04 pm

#342365

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Disable or Drop

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ncbaras Valued Member Points: 63 More actions · Answer 1

I'm embarrassed to say I did NOT know that disable options were available for that many objects. Thank you for giving me more to research! I guess that means I historically have dropped...

I think the drop/disable decision will often reside in how likely something is anticipated to come back. Disabling objects to push a test case through makes sense, but I can see someone going overboard and keeping tons of disabled objects around because they MIGHT need them again one day. The type-A in me would lean towards dropping more often than not to keep the environment from getting too cluttered.

phonetictalk Hall of Fame Points: 3582 More actions · Answer 2

I tend towards dropping for many database objects (such as indexes,discontinued ETLs, stored procs, etc).

Primarily because I don't like having junk sit around in production. If I know today that it's not needed, but I leave it there, will it ever be deleted? My experience tells me it's unlikely. (9 months ago I did a clean-up of obsolete objects in one database, and I dropped 40% of the stored procs.)

However, I do have source control so I don't have to worry about losing something permanently and, for most things, restoring from source control is as fast as re-enabling it.

Leonard
Madison, WI

Steve Jones - SSC Editor SSC Guru Points: 734418 More actions · Answer 3

phonetictalk - Friday, January 12, 2018 11:34 AM
I tend towards dropping for many database objects (such as indexes,discontinued ETLs, stored procs, etc).
Primarily because I don't like having junk sit around in production. If I know today that it's not needed, but I leave it there, will it ever be deleted? My experience tells me it's unlikely. (9 months ago I did a clean-up of obsolete objects in one database, and I dropped 40% of the stored procs.)
However, I do have source control so I don't have to worry about losing something permanently and, for most things, restoring from source control is as fast as re-enabling it.

Having it in a VCS does make it easy to remove, but I still tend to disable with a reminder (group reminder) to drop/delete after xx days. Usually that's months to a year to be sure something isn't used.