It’s T-SQL Tuesday again! And Garry Bargsley (blog|twitter) has asked us what we have planned for the end of the year?

This is another somewhat difficult one for me to answer, I did just start a new job remember? So instead let’s talk about one thing I’ve seen done that always impresses me. Planning. Of course this assumes that you have the time for proactive behavior not just reactive, but if you’ve got the time it can be quite helpful.

Spend a couple of days thinking about all of the things that are wrong with your system, no matter how large and time-consuming or small and petty. If you have a team spend some time brainstorming. What would you do to make your systems perfect? Now run diagnostic queries like Glenn Berry’s (blog|twitter) diagnostic scripts, or Brent Ozar Unlimited’s (blog|twitter) sp_blitz. Take your ideas, the output from whatever scripts you run (and running multiple scripts is not a terrible idea), and any thing else you can find and add them all to a list.

Now take that list and prioritize. Sort it by importance, speed you can get things done (quick wins are always nice), internal priorities, whatever. The longer tasks can become projects, the shorter ones a series of tickets. Then take the whole mass to management to confirm priorities.

Now you have your plans for the rest of the year and possibly even the beginning of next year.