So Now I’m Gilligan, Finally

Okay I was tagged by Tim Mitchell on the Deserted Island scenario started by Tim Ford which goes like this:

So You’re On A Deserted Island With WiFi and you’re still on the clock at work.  Okay, so not a very good situational exercise here, but let’s roll with it; we’ll call it a virtual deserted island.  Perhaps what I should simply ask is if you had a month without any walk-up work, no projects due, no performance issues that require you to devote time from anything other than a wishlist of items you’ve been wanting to get accomplished at work but keep getting pulled away from I ask this question: what would be the top items that would get your attention?

There’s so much that I could do, I almost don’t know where to start and I rather be off hanging out with Mary Ann anyway, but that isn’t an option in this scenario so:

I’ll start with cleaning up security.  It seems like no matter where you go or how long they’ve been running SQL Server the security is messed up.  I’d clean out dead logins and make sure the ones left met the least privileges test.  In my current environment that would take about an hour (I guess I should get on it then), at my last job it would take most of the month.

Next I’d automate testing of my backups on at least at weekly basis by restoring to a development server.  Unfortunately valid backups tend to be one of the things I take for granted.  This would also include setting up a plan to validate the backups that have already gone to tape and off-site.  I think this is one thing that many administrators, system and SQL, leave out.

Next would come tuning up database maintenance.  I’d start with Michelle Ufford’s index maintenance script and work from there to add in DBCC checks as well.

Then I’d work on monitoring scripts, traces, and performance monitor logs to compare to my baseline or to create my baseline and then compare to it.

Since I’m so late in posting this and someone else might like Mary Ann, too, I’m not going to tag anyone else.