B.3. Monthly tasks

• Review and update documentation and scripts as appropriate, ensuring their accuracy and suitability for use in disaster-recovery situations.

• Review and plan the implementation of any service packs and/or hotfixes as appropriate.

• Conduct capacity planning using the inputs from the weekly baseline-analysis and disk-usage tasks. In addition to using this as a chance to identify upcoming budgetary requirements, this task may also serve as an opportunity to consolidate databases and/or instances for a better performance/resource usage balance.

• Conduct "fire drills" to practice recovering from various failure conditions. Ideally these drills are random and unannounced and involve simulated corruption (preferably not on production databases!) to ensure all staff are capable of recovering from a wide variety of possible failure conditions. The more these events are simulated and practiced, the quicker the recovery in the event of a real disaster.