Why we maintain databases...

I was blissfully unaware of this issue until I came in this morning and saw the debris...

The players: Freakshow and Tiny (my co-workers), the Customer, and the application Vendor.

Customer: Everything is slow and my cluster keeps failing over! Must be SQL Server!
Freakshow: We didn't change anything on your servers sir...
Customer: You must have!
Freakshow: Could be bad indexes or stats...
Customer's Vendor: Oracle doesn't have this issue
Freakshow: Grrrr....
Tiny: Double Grrrrrr.....
Freakshow: You have 49 million rows, and are table scanning/locking...
Customer: We have 3 years of data
Vendor: You should have 90 days, and you are 3 years behind on versions of the application...
Freakshow: Let me update the stats....
Customer: Hey...its working!!!
Vendor: You know that 'purge' utility we provide?....it comes with fries :)
Freakshow: I'm going back to bed
Tiny: I'm going home (6 hours past end of the shift...)

Moral: Purge your data, keep your versions up, and maintain your indexes folks...