Overview

Maintaining a healthy SQL Server database is essential for performance, reliability, and the long-term success of your operation. Alliant provides an initial setup of a SQL Server maintenance plan for customers using the Alliant database.

Important: Once the maintenance plan is in place, it becomes the responsibility of the customer’s IT team to ensure it continues to run successfully. This includes:

• Verifying that backups are being created as expected.
• Monitoring logs for errors or failures.
• Ensuring adequate disk space is available.

IT should review and confirm that the maintenance plan is running properly at least once a month. 

Below is an overview of the key components included in the maintenance plan, why each task is important, and what it does.

Nightly Maintenance

The following tasks are completed in a nightly maintenance plan. 

Regular Database Backups

• Purpose: Protect against data loss by capturing full backups of your database. 
• Benefits: Full backups ensure your business prevents data loss, facilitates disaster recovery, and ensures business continuity.

Database Integrity Checks

• Purpose: Detect and repair corruption in database structures.
• Benefits: These checks help detect potential corruption early. Running integrity checks regularly prevents small issues from escalating into system-wide problems.

Index Maintenance: Rebuild and Reorganize Indexes

• Purpose: Reduce fragmentation in indexes that slow down query performance. 
• Benefits: Improves data access speed and overall database responsiveness.

Update Statistics

• Purpose: Refresh the statistical data that SQL Server uses to optimize query plans. 
• Benefits: Enhances query performance by providing up-to-date data distribution information.

Cleanup History

• Purpose: Remove old backup files and outdated maintenance logs to free up space and maintain system performance.
• Benefits: Prevents unnecessary storage consumption and keeps the system organized.

Shrink Log

• Purpose: Shrinking a SQL log file reclaims unused disk space and creates smaller backup files.
• Benefits: It temporarily frees up valuable storage space and helps manage disk usage more efficiently.