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 – Index Maintenance

It’s been a couple of weeks since my last post, but I swear I have a good excuse. I’ve been busily working on a separate writing project, but I’m back now and ready to continue rolling my own maintenance plan. To recap, so far I’ve covered backups, backup cleanup, and updating statistics. Today I’m going [...]

March 5, 2012  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: Maintenance  No Comments

RYO Maintenance Plan – Update Statistics

Another key component of any good maintenance plan is updating statistics. Statistics are what help the SQL Server optimizer choose the best execution plan for your queries. Let your stats get too far out of date, and watch your query performance tank. For me, the biggest shortcoming of the update statistics maintenance plan task is [...]

February 21, 2012  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: Maintenance  2 Comments

Using Powershell to Deploy Performance Monitor

As good little DBAs, we should be gathering baseline statistics for our database servers. These stats can give us insight into what’s changed when performance is suddenly in the toilet. They can also provide a basis for determining what systems can be consolidated, downsized, or virtualized, which has become quite the topic of discussion with [...]

February 13, 2012  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: Powershell  2 Comments

RYO Maintenance Plan – Enhancement Request

In response to my last post, I got a very interesting comment from Philip: “I would love to see a way to add logic that will verify at least X backup files for a given DB remain. Specifically, in my organization, I would like to delete all but the most recent one– even if that [...]

February 9, 2012  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Maintenance, T-SQL  No Comments