Archive for the ‘Maintenance’ Category

Testing backups – Is RESTORE DATABASE…VERIFYONLY good enough?

Is it just me, or does there seem to be a lot of discussion these days about testing backups and having a good restore plan in place, before you need it.  You don’t want to be “testing” your backups at 3am during a critical restore operation. Verify Backup Integrity (aka RESTORE VERIFYONLY) So when it [...]

June 4, 2012  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Maintenance  2 Comments

Better Living Thru Powershell: Update Statistics in Parallel

As part of a project I’m currently involved with, we’re migrating a database to SQL Server 2008 and performing some internal updates to the schema and data. Once the database portion of the upgrade is complete, we’d like to update all database statistics before continuing. On a large database, updating all statistics with a full [...]

April 12, 2012  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Maintenance, Powershell  14 Comments

Backup script skipping databases – and the fix!

I’ve been using my RYO Maintenance scripts for a little while now, and they’ve been working great. Almost. One day I noticed that the backup script hadn’t backed up all of the databases on my instance. I checked the job history, no errors. I checked the SQL Server log, no errors. I checked the Windows [...]

March 26, 2012  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: Maintenance  13 Comments

RYO Maintenance Plan – History Cleanup

The last step in our campaign to rid the world of maintenance plans deals with housekeeping: the history cleanup step. I know. Cleanup is never the sexiest of jobs, but just like the dishes or the laundry, it still needs to be done occasionally. If you were to create an true maintenance plan and include [...]

March 22, 2012  Tags: ,   Posted in: Maintenance  No Comments

RYO Maintenance Plan – Integrity Checks

Happy Monday! Everyone fully recovered from St. Patrick’s Day? Hopefully the weather where you are was as perfect as it was here in Cleveland. Today’s piece of RYO Maintenance Plan deals with database integrity checks; a critical component second only to backups in my book.В  The procedure I’ve written is really just a wrapper for [...]

March 19, 2012  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: Maintenance  No Comments