[Note from Pinal]: This is a 98th episode of Notes from the Field series. Maintenance of the database is a very critical activity and I have always seen DBA taking it very seriously. There is a only one problem – there is no single solution or guidance for how to maintain the database. Everybody has their own opinion and way to do different tasks. System maintenance is very straight forward task but I have seen quite often experts even getting confused with the same. Many only focus on index maintenance, statistics maintenance and a few other tasks are common, but understanding the real philosophy of this task is something beyond indexes. When I asked my good friend Stuart about system maintenance, he came up with very interesting guidelines for system maintenance.