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It’s a cold, cold day here in Minnesota.  A great day for staying in and working on some in-home tasks.  Maybe take some time to double check the furnace, check the air filter, and verify that all of the windows of the house are locked and sealed.  At a time when the expected high is -8 F, this isn’t a time when anyone would want to see a failure in any of the things that provide the heat.

SQL Server is much the same way.  No one wants and outage and to make sure that doesn’t happen you need to stay vigilant and perform monthly maintenance on your SQL Servers.  It doesn’t take a lot of work.  Check the configuration, performance, and a few other things.  But if you do these things, it will help ensure there aren’t unexpected outages and that if there is, you have the tools in place to recover in the expected amount of time.

All of these things that you need to check can be found in my 10 Monthly Maintenance Tasks for SQL Server.  It covers most everything in your SQL Server environment that needs to be checked. If you see anything missing from that list, please leave a comment on this post.  And if there are good resources out there that should be included on the list – share those as well.

Checklist Updates

Since last month, the checklist has gone through a few significant changes.  The main changes are in the order of the tasks and the flow of the maintenance process.  These changes were mainly added to improve the usefulness and opportunity for you, the reader, to leverage the checklist and better maintain your environment.

Besides those changes, there are a couple other changes as well:

• Added cumulative update for SQL Server 2012 SP1
• Added cumulative update for SQL Server 2008 SP3

If you have time to take a look at it, the SQL Server 2012 Product Guide to see how you can use SQL Server in your environment.

SOMETHING MISSING?

Is there something missing in this checklist or with the pages that has been overlooked?  Any cool links that would aid in the review of your SQL Server environments?  If so, leave a comment below and I’ll take a look.