DBCC CHECK DB
Steve and I recently repaired SQL Database Corruption for a customer who wasn’t running DBCC Check DB on a regular basis. Please don’t do this. DBCC Check DB both needs to be run on a regular basis AND you need to be monitoring the results.
It’s so important to know about corruption as close to when it happens as possible. If you aren’t checking for it you have the risk you out run your backups so when it is discovered you don’t have a backup that doesn’t contain the corruption and repair becomes more complex.
There are many excuses for not running DBCC Check DB regularly. I didn’t know about it, its too slow, … We’ll now you know about it and to respond about it taking to long to run you have a few options. First you should consider faster hardware if thats an option and second if that isn’t a possibility you can check specific tables for corruption daily and then check the whole database weekly or monthly.
I reference you back to an earlier post about what is the worse that can happen and can you life with it if you aren’t running DBCC Check DB. I can’t answer that for you but for me that answer is no. You need to be checking for corruption. My rule of thumb is once per day but there are certain circumstances where that isn’t possible so you work around it like I suggested above.
A future blog post will get into all the different options and how best to use DBCC Check DB.