Excess capacity available to a database system in a capacity controlled environment can be effectively managed for maintenance and/or tuning activities. In this context, excess capacity can be used as needed and/or on a temporary basis. Furthermore, maintenance and/or tuning activities can be performed without requiring the use of the configured or allotted capacity. As a result, these operations can be performed without adversely affecting other operations which may be deemed more critical by the users of databases. System maintenance and tuning (or fine tuning) of a database environment can, for example, include operations associated with “Physical Tuning,” and “Index Tuning”. Some exemplary operations include collecting Statistics, analyzing a database workload, sampling, analyzing an execution plan, creating indexes.