Brad’s Sure Guide to SQL Server Maintenance Plans- P17: SQL Server has a reputation as being a simple database application to install, configure, and maintain. This is a little misleading. SQL Server is a powerful relational database that can handle the needs of the largest organizations and, as such, its proper maintenance almost certainly requires the attention of an experienced DBA. | Chapter 3 Getting Started with the Maintenance Plan Wizard Figure The first maintenance task of the Maintenance Plan ran successfully. Only once you ve achieved successful test executions for each of the steps in the Maintenance Plan are you ready to put this Maintenance Plan into production. If you get any errors be sure to identify and fix the problems before testing the rest of the jobs. Often if one job fails then other jobs will fail and you might as well fix them as soon as you can. Error messages appear as links on the screen so if you do get an error check out the error message and hopefully you will be able to figure out what the problem is and fix it. So what s the moral of this story Don t use a Maintenance Plan s Execute option to test plans with multiple subplans. Instead test one maintenance subplan at a time using its related SQL Server Agent job. Summary Having seen the big picture of how to use the Maintenance Plan Wizard to create a Maintenance Plan next we will first spend a chapter on job scheduling then we will spend a chapter on each of the eleven maintenance tasks. This way you will gain a better understanding of what each one does and how it best fits or doesn t fit with your SQL Server s maintenance needs. As you read about each of these tasks keep in mind that they apply not only to the Maintenance Plan Wizard but also to the Maintenance Plan Designer which will be discussed later in this book . 81 Chapter 4 Task Scheduling Starting with Chapter 5 we begin a run of eleven chapters that explain the ins and outs of each of the eleven maintenance tasks that you can define and schedule as part of a SQL Server Maintenance Plan. The scheduling of a task within a Maintenance Plan created using the Wizard or Designer is a step that is a little more complex than it may first appear and is common to the configuration of every task that we ll discuss in subsequent chapters. This chapter will therefore provide a broad overview of the essential .
