Maintaining databases
You should carry out regular maintenance of your databases to make sure that they continue to perform well and can be recovered in the event of a system failure. The maintenance tasks that should be performed regularly include the following:
▪Check the integrity of a database to make sure that data has not been corrupted by a system error.
▪Reorganize or rebuilding index to improve performance. This is particularly important for projects that are running large numbers of interviews.
▪Release unused disk space.
▪Back up a database.
If you are using the simple database recovery model, the SQL transaction logs are truncated automatically. If you are using a different recovery model, you might need to truncate or delete the SQL transaction logs manually: see
Deleting or truncating log files.
In Microsoft SQL Server, you can set up maintenance tasks that execute according to a schedule that you define. The easiest way to do this is to use the Maintenance Plan Wizard.
This section includes step-by-step instructions for using the wizards to reorganize the indexes of your project databases. You can adapt the instructions to run other maintenance tasks as well. For more information about the wizards or maintenance tasks in general, see the SQL Server Books Online documentation.
Example maintenance plan
This is an example of a maintenance plan.
When your maintenance plan is in place, ensure that you can restore from your database backups.
Weekly full backup
Weekly database compress
Daily differential backup
See
See also
