Building SQL ConstantCare®: Which Recommendations Do People Mute?

Our SQL ConstantCare® service sends you daily recommendations for specific tasks that will improve your SQL Server’s health and performance.

Next to each recommendation, there’s a Mute link that you can click on to either mute the recommendation entirely, or mute it for specific databases, indexes, or queries:

When we brought out that feature last year, I was really curious to see what recommendations people would mute. Before the Mute links came out, users had always been able to mute things by hitting reply and telling me what to mute, but I guessed that they’d get more ambitious with muting stuff once they were allowed to mute it themselves without talking to me. You can read what they were muting back then.

Here’s what you’re muting:

1. Consider Enabling Query Store – now muted by 151 users. I’ve blogged about why people aren’t using Query Store, and this is still a bit of a bummer. I think we could turn this number around, but users need to see value out of the feature. It’s just not easy enough yet for most folks to go from turning it on, to configuring it properly, to getting value out of it.
2. Check for Corruption ASAP – 110 users. Keep in mind that this isn’t the number of people who have been alerted about the lack of corruption checking, and then actually fixed it. These are just the people who said, “Yeah, I know I’m not checking for corruption, and you can mute that recommendation.” That’s why I’m asking for SQL Server to just start automatically check data integrity in the background. It’s too important to leave to end users to implement.
3. Transaction Log Larger than Data File – 104 users. I need to go back and tweak the code on this rule because I’ve seen some commonalities: for example, people seem to run into this problem a lot on the SSIS DB and want to ignore it.
4. Set Fill Factor Higher – 65 users. This rule currently fires for fill factors 79% and lower. I may tweak the threshold on this one too.
5. Check Unusual Database States – 60 users. Dang, y’all really like keeping offline databases around. I think I wanna tweak this one to just alert when a formerly-online database drops offline.
6. Take a Full Backup – 59 users. COME ON NOW.
7. Move User Databases Off the C Drive – 56 users. That’s fair: once we’ve found this problem, you probably don’t want to hear about it repeatedly. I’m not sure there’s value in keeping this rule around because it doesn’t look like a lot of people are willing to fix it.
8. Take a Log Backup – 44 users. We’re only alerting you for databases in full recovery model that haven’t had a log backup in several days. Right now, we don’t have logic to detect if you’re offloading log backups to a readable secondary, but based on this high number of mutes, that’s something we need to build.
9. Move TempDB Off the C Drive – 42 users. See #7.
10. Enable Checksums for Corruption Detection – 39 users. This one kinda surprises me because it’s so safe, easy, and fast. I think I need to work on my communication about the rule to explain why it’s so important.

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