As an administrator of a database, you must periodically carry out certain administration tasks. Many of these administration tasks can be automated.
The following table is an example for scheduling periodic administration tasks. Depending on how large you configured your database and how much of its capacity is in use, these administration tasks may need to be performed more or less frequently than in this example.
Action |
Occurrence |
Comments and Recommendations |
More information |
---|---|---|---|
Complete data backup |
On each productive day or according to your backup schedule |
The more recent the last data backup, the quicker you can restore the database after a system failure. Every recovery requires a complete data backup as a starting point. |
|
Incremental data backup |
Optional Once to multiple times a day, according to your backup schedule |
If you cannot afford a complete data backup every day, then you should perform at least an incremental data backup on each productive day. Incremental data backups are cumulative: if you recover your database, only the most recent incremental backup is used. |
See above |
Log backup |
Once to multiple times a day, depending on how much data was changed in the database and according to your backup schedule |
Only necessary if automatic log backup is switched off. |
|
Archiving backup files |
Regularly Depending on how much space is available for your log backups |
Only necessary for log backups on data carriers of the FILE type |
|
Checking database structures |
Once a week |
We recommend that you check the database structures at times when the database load is low, or using a system copy. |
|
Updating SQL optimizer statistics |
Once a week |
For SAP systems refer to SAP note 927882 Outside SAP systems, we recommend that you activate the automatic statistics update |
SAP Note 927882 |
Automating Administration Tasks
If you use the database in a production system, we recommend that you continuously monitor the database, see Monitoring Databases.