As part of its regular, ongoing, day-to-day activities, your SQL Server instance would naturally collect historical data about its automated operations. If left unchecked, this historical data could pile up, leading to wasted storage space, performance hits, and even worse issues.
MSDB would obviously be collecting data about the SQL Agent job executions. But there are also several other types of historical data that needs to be cleaned up once in a while. I hope to cover all bases and leave no historical data un-cleaned.
In fact, I found so much stuff that need to be periodically cleaned up in MSDB and in SQL Server in general, that I ended up splitting this information into 2 posts!
Check them out at the official Madeira Data Solutions blog:
Keep Your MSDB Clean – Part 1
- Output .txt Files
- CommandLog
- Backup History
- Job History
- Maintenance Plan History
- SQL Server and SQL Server Agent Error Logs
- DB Mail History
Keep Your MSDB Clean – Part 2
- Log Shipping History
- MultiServer Administration (MSX) Download List
- Database Mirroring Monitor History
- Replication Monitor History
- Change Data Capture History
- Policy-Based Management Execution History
- The suspect_pages Table
- The dbo.sysssislog Table