Periodic Administration Tasks

As a database administrator you must periodically carry out certain administration tasks. Many of these administration tasks can be automated.

Procedure

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, you may have to carry out these administration tasks more or less frequently than in this example.

Periodic Administration Tasks (Example)
Task	Frequency	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 restore requires a complete data backup as a starting point.	Backing Up Data
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 carry out 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.	Backing Up Log Entries
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	Archiving Backup Files
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.	Checking Database Structures
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	SQL Optimizer Statistics SAP Note 927882

More Information

Automating Administration Tasks

If you use the database in a production system, we recommend that you continuously monitor the database, see Monitoring Databases