IT Best Practices for Database Maintenance
Overview Nightly Maintenance Regular Database Backups Database Integrity Checks Index Maintenance: Rebuild and Reorganize Indexes Update Statistics Cleanup History Shrink Log 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 Cleanup History Purpose: Remove old backup files and outdated maintenance logs to free up space and maintain system performance.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. The Shrink Log task can be done weekly instead of daily if desired.
