Integrity Checks are Useless*

Minion CheckDB
Minion CheckDB
Integrity checks have become more and more important over the years, as companies store more and more data. This data is absolutely critical, so when corruption happens, it can break a company.

But in all but the smallest shops, running any kind of integrity check is all but completely useless.

Integrity checks without management

DBCC CHECKDB was originally written without consideration of management. For a very long time, you could only output CHECKDB results to the client – meaning you had to run it by hand – or to the error log. Seriously, what good is that? Later, Microsoft added the ability to output CHECKDB results to a table, but that remained undocumented for years so very few people knew it even existed.

That’s not the only problem. A lot of DBAs don’t run CHECKDB at all, because large databases take a long time to process. CHECKDB takes an internal snapshot for its operations. For large databases, that snapshot can fill up the drive, killing the integrity check process entirely. So, you have nothing to show for your efforts. Some DBAs tried to get around this issue by moving to CHECKTABLE instead, but that process comes with the same issues, and is even harder to manage because there are so many more tables than databases.

Integrity checks without reporting

Another reason that running DBCC CHECKDB is useless is this: reporting is still very difficult. Let’s say you have 50 servers – yes, I know a lot of you may have many more than that – and CHECKDB is set to run through a maintenance plan, outputting results to the SQL error log. In this scenario…

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