A best practice is a task or set of steps that best meet particular needs within the day-to-day administrative tasks. As a DBA, you must evaluate the commonly accepted practices, best practices and determine the best ones to apply to the environment.

To implement best practices, we should first evaluate and analyze if the existing environment is managed efficiently according to the practices accepted in the industry. There are plenty of tools available that enable the user to analyze the system on a particular set of best practices.

For SQL Server environments, Microsoft is offering two sets of tools that will help DBAs to analyze the set of SQL Server instances and recommend best practices to implement. The tools are Microsoft Codename Atlanta and SQL Server 2008 R2 Best Practices Analyzer. Microsoft Codename Atlanta (still in beta testing at the time of writing) is a secure cloud service that proactively monitors the SQL Server deployment...