Over the last several months there has been significant chatter around what is background database maintenance and why is it important for Exchange 2010 databases. Hopefully this article will answe...
Updated Jul 01, 2019
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A while back, I had come up with a method for reclaiming whitespace on database in a DAG, and I'm wondering if it has the same impact that an offline defrag does, or perhaps another negative impact that I overlooked.
What I did was, delete the passive copies of the database, and then reseed them. The new copies that were created took up less space on the file system because they no longer contained the white space. If I remember correctly, transaction logs are kept intact, because the reseeding process copies them over too. After the reseeding process was completed, and the passive copies were all in a "Healthy" state, I activated one of the passive copies, and repeated the process on the last remaining copy.
I did this over a year ago, so my memory could be a little fuzzy. The main reason behind coming up with this method of doing it, was that there were still a lot of Outlook 2003 users, and it was an organization with employees working 24x7, so moving mailboxes to a new database would have caused a service interruption. Doing it this way allowed me to free up the space without anyone noticing.
Obviously this method only works with a DAG. Thoughts?
Another question comes to mind, the preferred method mentioned only works for mailbox databases. What is the preferred method for a public folder database?