SQL Server Bad & Best Practices

Question

yesterday I found out that setting a database on auto growth is not a very good thing.

Are there other basic 'bad' practices (or best practices) when having SQL Server databases in production?

thx, Lieven Cardoen

Answer 1

Do you have data and logs on separate devices. Is tempdb a reasonable size? Do you have disaster recovery plan? The first time you have to recover a database is not the time to start reading up on how to do it!

Are you running the default maintenance plan (DBCC, update statistics and all that stuff)? Do you know what it all does and do you monitor it for any issues?

Do you have some performance metrics on disk I/O, memory, cpu. Maybe some queries you can monitor on a regular basis and look for performance degradation.

With a new application and database, all your queries will be fast for awhile, but as your database grows, performance problems may sneak up on you if you aren't proactive.

Answer 2

stop the sql server from using all available memory... on a box with 4gb of ram, i'd limit it to 3gb, ensuring 1gb is left for the os.

Answer 3

My personal favorite:

Do you have a backup plan?

I've seen too many databases with the transaction logs filling up the disk...

If you're getting serious with SQL take a look at SqlServerCentral.com. They have many good articles on everything SQL related.