The end of the year is when I do a little data cleanup. Not a lot, but some. Work slows down, with no major deadlines, so I'm able to spend a bit of time organizing myself. I usually go through my downloads and documents folders, deleting files I don't expect to use. I ensure that my jobs removing older log and temp files are running, especially on the laptops. A lot of disuse in 2021 had a few of them filling disks with more files than I had expected.

In a few positions I've had as a DBA, this was a time when we'd look to archive away some older databases, and even some data. It was rare, but always invigorating because we knew queries would run faster in systems when we could archive off data. I haven't ever started with clean databases in a new year, but in a couple of jobs we'd archive off all data that was more than one or two years old into another database. It was available if someone needed it, but the main OLTP databases would contain only one or two years' worth of data, helping queries perform quicker at the start of the year.

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