DBA Tasks, 1

[marvin51796]

You all have given me some major help learning about sybase, and how it is setup,
Can someone please give me a list of what is good to do on a weekly/month basis to sybase to keep it running and free of errors.
thnxs

 

[JMCraig]

There's a comprehensive list in the Performance and Tuning Guide (although in my opinion it goes rather overboard in some ways). Here's my personal list:

1. Keep a Current Backup of the master DB
This is really important. I generally recommend to people that they schedule this at least weekly (even though the data is likely to be virtually static); it's just hard to remember to do a fresh backup whenever you do something that would justify it.

2. Do DBCC checks on a regular basis in the process of backing up
This helps spot problems while they're still small enough to fix (at least usually).

3. Back up the Transaction Log
I'd do this at least daily. A startling number of people either have log truncation on checkpoint enabled or what they do is back up the DB and truncate the log. Don't do it! Keep many generations of log backups; if you happen to end up with an unreadable full DB dump, you can use an older one and bring it to current with the transaction dumps.

4. Mirror your Sybase Devices
At least mirror your master and log devices. This makes recovery much simpler and faster if you should lose a drive.

And, although Sybase doesn't recommend it, I like to move the tempdb off the master device so that it's not being mirrored. If you have an OS that supports it, running tempdb from a RAM-based device often results in impressive speed gains.

5. Finally, document your Usages for user DB's
Instructions for how to do this are in the Sys. Admin Guide, but basically, you can just do this:

select * from master..sysusages
where dbid = db_id ('<your db name here>')

Take the info that this query returns and print it out and either tape it to the side of your server or put it in a file drawer (depending upon personal preference).

HTH,

J M Craig
Alpha-G Consulting, LLC
nsjmcraig@netscape.net