Yesterday afternoon my storage administrator came to me and asked me to look at his Enterprise Vault database and make sure that they were receiving the proper maintenance because he was running a routine over the weekend to remove some e-mails that had exceeded their retention period and it was painfully slow.  He was only about to delete about a half-million e-mails over the course of the entire weekend.  It is even more interesting because when I checked the databases yesterday all of them combined did not exceed 100 GB.

The administrator proceeded to call Symantec and spoke with an engineer who directed him to the following page.  He then forwarded the link and asked me to make sure I was following their best practices listed on their site.  No problem, I would be glad to compare their recommendations to our maintenance regimen.

I have included a screen shot just in case the page disappears…

Maintenance Plan Recommendation from Symantec

Needless to say, I did not modify my maintenance regimen to include the deprecated Shrink Databases recommendation.  If you are fine with this item, then you really need to read Paul Randall’s blog entry on why you should NEVER shrink your database.  He explains much better than I do and he is the expert.  Maybe someone out there knows someone at Symantec and we can get them to read the blog, attend a SQL Saturday, PASS Summit, or even Paul’s Immersion Event training.  Someone please get them some help!  Enjoy!