Looking at my schedule I realized after discussing with fellow DBA’s that I was missing out on something ~ T-SQL Tuesday. I think this is fantastic idea and to host a T-SQL Tuesday you can contact Adam Machanic.

Today is T-SQL Tuesday #31 and is by Aaron Nelson on Logging……….

Logging

In general, to me, logging is an essential part of my every day activities as a DBA. It helps me in many ways tracking changes from deployments from fellow DBA’s and myself to bringing back statistical information for us to determine growth.

I recently came across two real world examples that has helped me with logging.

1. A DBA friend was in the middle of a deployment; after several minutes the deployment was labeled complete and everyone was on their merry way. A few days later some catastrophic events unfolded; and everyone wanted to know the why; because we were logging the who, what, when along with the commands given we traced back quickly the change and what was changed by the user.
2. I’m a huge fan of the Utility Database idea; have been ever sense I sat in on it at PASS ( Chris Shaw presented it). After getting back to the office it was my mission to get this idea implemented in. Currently, we are building an enterprise edition out that encaptulates a plethora of information from statistical stats, heartbeats, file sizes, space on drives, and the list goes on. Logging this information will help guide and plan for sizing and space.

I’ve only touched on a couple of topics regarding logging; there is so much more out there.