Many of us work on a database of some sort. For most that is probably SQL Server, but it could be some other platform as well. Whether we are directly in charge of managing the system or not, I would guess most of us would also prefer the system to be working. When we go to connect, whether to our development system or a production application powered by a large database platform, there's not shortage of irritation if the database isn't available.

Many of us try to ensure that we don't intentionally or unintentionally cause our database systems to go down. There are enough times we have to stop and start our servers for patches or some other update, not to mention the occasional deployment that might interrupt the use of parts of the system or even an entire database. When I've been responsible for actually managing database systems, I made it a point of pride to have as little downtime as possible, building solutions to minimize the impact to users of any maintenance operations.

Do you know what the cost of database downtime is in your company? I would likely have no idea in most of my organizations, though I'm sure salespeople could tell you there's some measurement they'd use. Amazon knows what downtime costs them because they likely have a good idea of what the sell every minute of every day. If they're down, there aren't any alternatives for customers to purchase anything from Amazon.

However, if you're not in the direct business of selling something through your database platform directly to customers, you might not have a large cost. I've worked in companies where we relied on those computer systems, but we went down for hours, sometimes a day or two and salespeople rolled back to paper. Eventually they'd have to catch up later, and since some of those people were paid by the hour, there certainly was a cost. For many of us, however, downtime meant a longer work week, catching up on work once systems were up and running again. In one large organization where we sold software by the 10s or 100s (or more) of thousands of dollars, SQL Slammer shut down many systems for three days. It was a rough week, but the company continued to make sales and since most people were paid a salary, they were rather upset at us database people.

These days I'm sure there's a direct number for my employer if the database backing their main site goes down. We do sell some products directly there, though I think more come from our salespeople. However, I'm sure any downtime would be quite frowned upon. However, I wonder if the cost would be thousands of dollars a minute. There is a report for that database downtime averages $7900/minute. My guess (if that's true), is that we have something other than a normal distribution. There are probably some outliers that cost crazy amounts of money if their database goes down, while for most of us, it's an inconvenience or a small cost in the short term. Across a longer period (weeks), downtime might shut down the company.

No one wants downtime. Whether you're a developer that caused it with code that doesn't access the database properly, or an administrator that started some operations that blocks access to the database. I wonder if we quantified the actual cost to our systems, maybe we'd actually see management taking more of an interest in ensuring that software quality and maintenance practices were performed at a higher level of quality.

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The items that occur with minimal configuration are that only a single user can connect, Checkpoint is not executed, remote access and read-ahead are disabled, and start stored procedures do not run.

Tempdb also is not used, but this is not documented.

Ref: Start SQL Server with Minimal Configuration - click here

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