Poll Results: How Often You’re Running Maintenance Tasks
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Last week, I asked y’all how frequently you ran your full backups, corruption checks, index maintenance, and stats updates. The results after over 1,000 responses:
A few thoughts:
You’re typically taking full backups daily or weekly. I’m actually surprised by how many folks do weekly backups! That kinda scares me because if the backups take so long that you can’t do ’em overnight, then you’re probably gonna be horrified by restore times when things go wrong. You’ll have to do that big long full restore, plus the most recent diff. If you’re in that situation, you really wanna start checking out storage snapshot backups.
You’re doing index maintenance less frequently. Compare the backup and index maintenance responses, and weekly/monthly/less have higher responses than they did on the full backups answer. That’s good to hear! Fragmentation isn’t a problem that you want to tackle daily.
A lot of folks are doing daily stats updates. And right here, this is the problem that prompted this entire poll. I see a surprising number of people who do daily statistics updates, AND who complain about an unstable plan cache that constantly experiences parameter sniffing. The more you update stats, the more you’re freeing the plan cache, and you’re causing your own parameter sniffing issues by making the plan cache so unstable.
If I could give you one piece of advice, it would be to check for corruption more frequently than you do statistics updates. People don’t get fired for out-of-date stats: they get fired for losing data.










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