It’s a brand new year and hopefully it will be better than last year. While that may be particularly true this time around, really, wouldn’t it be nice if every year was better than the last? One way to help with that is checklists. Well, documentation in general, but in this case we are talking about checklists.

So, since you’ve probably just finished up a series of end of year tasks, and are now starting in on your new years tasks it’s the perfect time to write them down. What kind of stuff do I mean? Well, how about something like this as a starting point.

• Review min/max memory for each instance.
  You may have increased the memory size over the year and forgotten to update this setting. Now’s a good time for a review.
• Review instances for databases that are no longer in use.
• Review databases for objects that are no longer needed.
  Backup objects (tablename_20190125, spname_20180503, etc) are a great example.
• Did the job that legal makes such a big deal about finish correctly? You know, the one that takes a full backup, stores it to a long term retention area, and gets rid of the 7 year old backup?
• Were there any problems with any other special end of year batch jobs?

Anyway, you get the idea. Anything you did special over the last few weeks and that you plan on doing in the next few weeks is fair game. If you have the time you might want to add some review tasks. Make sure everything is where you think it is. You might even need to generate some data collection tasks (index usage for example) so that you have it for next year to see what, if any indexes are completed unused and can be gotten rid of. Heck, you might even add a task to review your existing documentation and make sure it’s all up to date.