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Free Webcast – Tomorrow:
Best practices for Analysis Services administration
This session takes you on a end-to-end tour of management features for Analysis Services. Along the way, you’ll learn important best practices direct from the product team about how to configure, optimize and manage your Analysis Server. We expect this to be an essential session for new and experienced Analysis Services administrators alike.
Presented by: Donald Farmer
> Register Now
> Live date: 6/23/2010 at 12:00 Pacific
Don’t Forget to Audit Your Systems from Time to Time
It’s easy to get caught up in pushing forward, supporting applications, building reports, answering questions and the like. I say "caught up…" because it can keep you from remembering to go back through your systems and making sure you have the basics in place and updated for your systems.
So, from time to time, make sure you step back and make sure you have the fundamentals covered.
– Are your backups working? Have you checked them? Have you tested a restore lately?
– If passworded, do you have the current backup passwords stored away but accessible if needed?
– Do you have encryption keys backed up?
– Do you have a copy of your SQL Server and OS set aside? You’ll need/want them for any potential restore.
– Do you have backups of all of your applications that run against your server?
– Have you checked for failed login attempts?
– Have you checked your event logs on the servers?
– Have you checked to make sure all of your databases are getting backed up? Don’t miss any new user databases…
It’s tough to have an exhaustive list here, but you’ve already set up most (all?) of these – I’m just suggesting that you’ll want to go back and audit your systems from time to time. It’s a very important piece of your work with SQL Server. Make sure the details, small stuff and boring maintenance things don’t get stale and out of date (or just outright not working) inadvertently.