TABLE OF CONTENTS All databases have internal structures that have to be maintained in some way or another and the Exchange Store is no different. You can take a database offline to rebuild it with the ESEUTIL utility or verify its internal structures with the ISINTEG utility, but these operations require you to deprive users of access to their mailboxes. Since Exchange is designed to be highly available with as little downtime as possible, it is obvious that some online maintenance operations are required. The Store performs online maintenance as a background task nightly to ensure logical consistency within the mailbox and public store databases and to remove unwanted data. As shown in Table 7.8, the Store performs 11 background maintenance tasks nightly.
| Task | Mailbox Store | Public Store |
|---|---|---|
| Purge indexes | Yes | Yes |
| Perform tombstone maintenance | Yes | Yes |
| Purge the deleted items cache | Yes | Yes |
| Expire outdated public folder content | No | Yes |
| Expire tombstones in public folders | No | Yes |
| Public folder conflict aging | No | Yes |
| Update server versions | No | Yes |
| Secure folders | No | Yes |
| Purge deleted mailboxes | Yes | No |
| Check for obsolete messages | Yes | Yes |
| Store defragmentation | Yes | Yes |
While the Store controls background maintenance, it actually only executes the first ten tasks. The last is performed by calling the ESE database engine to perform defragmentation, an action the Store takes after at least one of the ten tasks is complete. In concept, the difference between the tasks performed by the Store and those executed by...
