T-SQL Tuesday #157 – “End of Year Activity”

T-SQL Tuesday for 2022 concludes with an invitation post from Gary Bargsley who asks what year-end activities we’re working on. This time of year tends to slow down a bit but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to do.

Check out the full invitation post by clicking the T-SQL Tuesday logo and then read on below to find out what I’m up to this month.

Make Sure Alerts Are Alerting

Alerts are no good if they don’t alert you to an issue.

Now is a good time to make sure alerting jobs are running correctly. You don’t want to run into a situation where you could have caught an issue sooner but the alert was not setup correctly to e-mail you (or worse, configured to e-mail nobody at all).

Also review the e-mail list for various alerts and jobs. Lists that were setup years ago might include users who are no longer in a relevant role or they may have moved on from the company.

Check Trends

How are things like CPU, connections, and disk space trending? Do you need to start planning some changes to optimize for the year to come? Is there something urgent you need to take care of now before being out for the holidays?

Check what you can now to prevent needing to step away from opening gifts later.

Be Safe

You’re always careful, but be extra careful this time of year when it comes to production changes. This is especially true when it comes to changes that may fall into other areas outside of your own. You don’t want to get bothered while out on vacation and you don’t want to be the one that has to track someone else down while they are on vacation.

Just in case, I like to get an idea of who is available if needed. This can go for the holidays or year round. The less phone tag you have to play in a worst case scenario outage, the better.

Learning and Planning

Spend some time learning what can benefit you now and plan for what can benefit you in the year to come. Is there a conference you can start planning to attend? Is there a new technology that you’ll be using in the next few months that you can start learning now? I think you should always be learning but now is a good time to make sure you’re going in the right direction and learning what’s best for you.

No Rest for the Weary

That’s some of what my December looks like. The month started out a bit busier than usual but I’m expecting things to start wrapping up soon which will leave more blocks open on the calendar for the items above.

Thanks for reading!