Running a Clean Database Server
It doesn’t matter what combination of database engine and operating system you are deploying or if they are running on physical or virtual machines, a clean system is more likely to provide better performance.
In a perfect world, the server is dedicated to database services. If you can’t dedicate a physical machine to a single purpose it may make sense to use a virtual machine allowing you to manage machine resources dedicated to your database engine in a more granular fashion.
So, if running a virtual or dedicated hardware database server, now you can start tweaking the machine to be in a Clean state. I really enjoy (not sure why) going through the services on a server and disabling them, or changing the startup mode to manual, and stopping the service. In windows there are still a lot of services still turned on by default providing little value. I see little value from the Themes service on a database server.
A clean server may have visibly better performance. In addition, the exposer for hacker attacks is reduced for each service you are able to disable.
Are your servers clean? Share your thoughts on what a Clean server looks like with your online comments, or drop an email to btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben