It’s survey time again. I’ll be doing lots around VLDB maintenance in the coming months so I’d like to get more info from all of you about what’s happening in the field. I’ll be working on Katmai features, strategizing about Katmai+, blogging on maintenance topics, planning lectures, including a session for TechEd – VLDB Maintenance Q&A – and much more.

I have questions about your maintenance practices (e.g. backups, disaster recovery, fragmentation, file growth/shrink, stats, and so on). Additionally, I’d like to know about problems you have with VLDB maintenance, for databases around 100GB or larger. If you’re interested, you can do the following:

1.      Just let me know what maintenance problems you have, or if you have time;

2.      Let me know you want to fill in the survey and I’ll send it to you

What about incentives? By doing #1, you’ll be providing valuable feedback to the SQL dev team and letting me know what the most pressing issues are to discuss in lectures and the blog. By doing #2, if you fill in the survey, then in return for your time I’ll send you the latest copy of the Always-On DVD (by post). The DVD has 16 hours worth of hands-on labs from which to learn and has been very popular with those who’ve received it. In either case, I (or my team) should be able to help you with your problems – through email, the blog or maybe a conference call with you and your team.

So, if you’re interested in doing the survey, let me know – prandal@microsoft.com – otherwise just send me email describing your maintenance problems. [Edit - don't put 'survey' in the title or body of the message - seems that our email servers are filtering those out as spam]

In a few weeks I’ll summarize the results and start blogging answers etc