Server Maintenance
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Regardless of the application you’re using, it stands to reason that the application software won’t perform to its peak if the hardware and operating system on the server aren’t up to full speed. This is especially true for SQL Server; since it makes heavy demands of the only four pieces of hardware that really affect a server’s performance: CPU, disk, memory and network interfaces.
A full primer on server maintenance is beyond the reach of this tutorial, but familiarity with the process of monitoring your server on a periodic basis will go far in devising your overall maintenance strategy. There are a lot of good articles here on Informit and several good books on Safari (see the references section at the end of this article) and I have a tutorial or two that cover the Performance Monitor tool, which can shed some light on how things are performing on the server.
Another useful tip is to install the monitoring utilities that came with your server hardware. There are times when this is not appropriate, but a majority of the time you should have them installed and configured.
As part of any maintenance plan (server or otherwise) you should have a solid backup plan which is tested on a periodic basis. Backups are an integral part of your maintenance, and they are essential for recovery.
Your shop may use an after-market tool for backups, but if you don’t then you can use the backup software built right into the Windows server operating system. I’ve seen many shops that survive quite well using only the native backup tools. Read the Windows help file to learn how to automate the built-in tool to schedule your system backups. Note that this product won’t backup your SQL databases, but later in this tutorial I’ll show you how to back up your databases to the hard drive. The file backup software can then pick up that backup file. Just make sure you schedule the SQL Server database backup (if you are sending it to disk) before your regular file system backup takes place.
