The invitation for T-SQL Tuesday this month comes from Robert Pearl. It’s called HealthySQL and it’s a topic I like. I’ve spent a lot of time in my career being proactive with SQL Server databases, and keeping them healthy is important.

If you’d like to participate in the party, just write a blog post and publish it on the second Tuesday of the month.

However, if you’d just like to participate, take the topic anytime and write your post.

Healthy SQL Server

I would guess most of us would prefer to be healthy over being sick. While it’s hard to be extremely strict in taking care of ourselves, many of us do make efforts to eat better, exercise, etc. to maintain our physical health. If we don’t, then we get sick and are usually miserable.

The same thing can happen to our SQL Server instances, and if they get sick, many of us are miserable as well. Mostly because we might be working late, working overnight, or being yelled at by managers.

I learned a long time ago that no matter how well I take care of myself, I’ll get sick at some point. And no matter what I do for my SQL Servers, at some point they’ll have issues. However if the issues could have been easily prevented, it’s embarrassing and it calls into question my capabilities as a DBA.

I’ve got lots of stories of how I’ve prevented issues by keeping my servers healthy, but there are really a few simple things I’ve set up and worked on. I included these in my Avoiding a DBA’s Worst Days with Monitoring talk. I need to blog about these in more detail, but here they are with a few notes.

Backups

The core of any data system is the backup. If you have the data in a backup (and the backup is good), then you can recover from any other issues. As a result, I’ve tried to be sure that I have backups setup, monitoring on the backup jobs, and a process to make a copy of the backup somewhere else.

Space

Running out of disk space is one of the simplest things to avoid and one of the most embarrassing to deal with. I’ve written about placeholders, but you should be monitoring space, have placeholders available, and proactively look for more space as you get low.

Security

Security is important, and we read about issues all the time. However apart from hackers, loose security often means that users, developers, or anyone else can cause issues in your database. Tight security can be a pain, but it really prevents a lot of issues.

Resources

Resources refer to the hardware and software that allow your systems to function. If you don’t have enough resources for your workload, no one is happy and you are listening to complaints. Being proactive, looking to tune queries, reduce fragmentation, add indexes, reindex, update stats, and more are important here.

Deployment

Face it, we’ll always be changing our systems with new patches, code, etc. Building a decent test routine is important as we want to prevent deployments that will make our servers unhealthy. However having a plan to deal with issues (because you will have issues) means thinking about rollbacks or other methods of undoing problems.