I’ve thought about doing this for a while now and it seems to be about that time.  It’ll be a small list to start with, but I’ll add more in the months ahead.  Part of the reason I plan to start small is I’ll be adding companion pieces to this list as time goes on.

The basic premise here is that DBAs need to maintain their environment.  There is a lot that goes into accomplishing this.  To help you get through, I’ll be posting on a month to month basis a checklist of things to look out for to make certain that you are covering.

Monthly Checklist

1. 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?
2. Recovery Validation: Is everything for your recovery collected and being backed up?  Have you practices restoring at least one of your SQL Server databases from production in the last month?
3. 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 the support for SQL Server releases does end at some point.
   • SQL Server 2008 R2 CU 7
   • SQL Server 2008 SP 2 Cumulative Update 4
   • SQL Server 2008 SP 1 CU 14 – 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
4. Server Health: Check the performance statistics for your server(s).  Any unexpected items in your event log?
5. Database Health: Check the performance statistics for your database(s). Any unexpected items in your SQL Server logs?
6. Check Baselines: Are there any variances on the performance counters off of the baseline?  Is the baseline still valid?
7. Validate Capacity Plan: If you have a capacity plan in place for your environment, check to see that what you had planned for June matches the actuals.  Any threshold violations that may require adding capacity?
8. Status Report: What do you need to get done before next month?  What did you get done this month?  After the other tasks, write this all down and send it to your manager.

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.