General Guidelines

Prevention is better than cure. If a virus could get onto your database server and your data is valuable then you should protect it with anit-virus software. If there is a risk that you could pass an infected file on to a downstream server then you should protect with anti-virus. However, it is better to remove any way for the virus to arrive instead.

• For optimal performance it is generally better not to run Anti-Virus on your database server.
• If you do run Anti-Virus on your database server then exclude some key files to limit performance impact (see links in Bibliography for more detail).

Some examples of situations where running anti-virus on your database server may be necessary...

• Internet facing database servers
• Database servers with open ports to other servers that meet any of the criteria on this list
• Database servers that read or execute files from other servers.
• A database server that also runs HTTP servers, like IIS, or Apache.
• A database server that also hosts file shares.
• A database server that handles incoming or outgoing email messages (e.g. for SQL Server: SQL Mail or Database Mail)

Bibliography