up vote 0 down vote favorite
share [g+] share [fb]

My company has been on the IBM AS/400 (a.k.a. iSeries, System i, etc.) platform for many years. Our staff includes some RPG developers to develop our in-house applications and a system administrator to monitor the box, deal with backups, etc.

The writing on the wall is that we'll be switching over to SQL Server exclusively in the next year. We've already begun the transition; our new IP-PBX/auto-dialer uses SQL Server 2008 extensively. We are working our way up the learning curve with SQL Server, but none of us can legitimately describe ourself as a DBA.

So far, we're backing up the database. That's about it. What other maintenance tasks should we be doing on a regular basis to keep the database happy?

link|improve this question
feedback

1 Answer

up vote 3 down vote accepted
  • Backup (for sure). Study SQL Server books online to create flexible and most appropriate to your company backup strategy (differential, transaction logs backup, mirroring, etc)
  • indices rebuild/renew
  • statistics update (obsolescence of statistic can cause some queries to execute VERY slow)

It's a good practice to restore your backups every time (or selected at least) to check it's consistence/process

And it will be great to prepare some documents (checklists) for 'hot' cases - disaster recovery plans or so on. It will help to peoples who can not "legitimately describe ourself as a DBA" to recover database in case of emergency without unnecessary excitement

link|improve this answer
feedback

Your Answer

 
or
required, but never shown
discard

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.