It’s the first Monday of January and for most of us it’s probably a vacation day. No fear, you can do this tomorrow if you aren’t in the office today. And with resolutions being made all over the world in the last few days, let’s make a resolution to check up on all of our SQL Servers at least once per month.
As has been said before, the premise of these posts is to help DBAs maintain their environments by getting together a monthly checklist for their environments. Followed by going through and evaluating the SQL Server environment.
Since the December checklist, there haven’t been a lot of changes. This month is more of a reminder to get things done and to make sure that you start the year off right.
Monthly Checklist
- Backup Validation: Check everything involved in the backup process. Are your backups executing as desired? Are the monitoring jobs properly alerting to failures? Have their been any unexpected failures? Have backup duration times changed?
- Recovery Validation: Is everything for your recovery collected and being backed up? Have you practiced restoring at least one of your SQL Server databases from production in the last month?
- SQL Server Updates: Is your SQL Server environment up-to-date? Check each of your instances and review the most recent releases of SQL Server. Make a plan to determine when the most recent updates will be applied. Also, be aware that support for SQL Server releases do end at some point. Support for the version of SQL Server that you are currently using may no longer be supported.
- SQL Server 2012 RC0
- SQL Server 2008 R2 SP 1 CU3
- SQL Server 2008 R2 SP 1
- SQL Server 2008 R2 CU 10 – Support ends 7/10/2012
- SQL Server 2008 SP 3 CU 2
- SQL Server 2008 SP 3
- SQL Server 2008 SP 2 CU 7- Support ends 10/9/2012
- SQL Server 2008 SP 2 – Support ends 10/9/2012
- SQL Server 2008 SP 1 CU 16 – Support ends 10/11/2011
- SQL Server 2008 SP 1 – Support ends 10/11/2011
- SQL Server 2008 CU 10 – Support ended 4/13/2010
- SQL Server 2005 SP 4 CU 3 – Mainstream support ended 4/12/2011
- SQL Server 2005 SP 4 – Mainstream support ended 4/12/2011
- Check wait stats.
- Analyze your indexes (via IndexAnalysis)
Something Missing?
Is there something missing in this list that you think should be included? Leave a comment and I’ll add it in for next month. I’ll follow-up next month on the first Monday of the month and we’ll see how everyone that reads this is doing.
Related posts:
- September Monthly SQL Server Checklist
- June Monthly SQL Server Checklist
- July Monthly SQL Server Checklist
