Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Internals

Consistency checking

Although SQL Server itself doesn’t cause database corruptions, I/O subsystems—all the software and hardware between the SQL Server buffer pool and the metal oxide of the disk drives or memory chips of the solid-state drives—do cause the overwhelmingly vast majority of corruptions. For this reason, the common wisdom is that performing regular consistency checking is prudent because all database servers have an I/O subsystem of some sort. The definition of regular, in this sense, really depends on the situation and how confident you are with the integrity of your I/O subsystem. In general, performing a consistency check once a week would be acceptable. If resource constraints are an issue in your environment, consider restoring ...