Brad’s Sure Guide to SQL Server Maintenance Plans- P33: 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 12 Back Up Database Full Task also that the full database backup job will be completed before people come to work in the morning. As you can see there are a lot of assumptions being made and this is why I referred above to this discussion as being dicey. As discussed in Chapter 4 when you schedule jobs using the Maintenance Plan Wizard you have to take an initial guess as to when a job should run so that it doesn t interfere with other jobs. Once you have tested your jobs and also run them for a few days you will get a better feel for how good your assumptions were. If they were wrong you will then have to change the various scheduled jobs so that they fit better together. You will learn how to change a Maintenance Plan schedule in Chapter 19 on the Maintenance Plan Designer. Another thought may have occurred to you during this discussion is it possible to schedule the daily full backup job at a specified time Monday through Saturday and then at a different time on Sunday so as not to interfere with the weekly Sunday maintenance jobs Yes it is but it is at this point that the Maintenance Plan Wizard falls short as it does not allow you to set multiple schedules for a single task within the same Maintenance Plan. The work-around for this is to create multiple Maintenance Plans each with their own independent schedules. Another option is to use the Maintenance Plan Designer which allows greater flexibility than does the Wizard. In other words what I am saying is that if you want to perform tasks that are not easily done from within the Wizard such as creating multiple schedules for the same task then you should probably consider using the Maintenance Plan Designer to create your Maintenance Plans or using T-SQL or PowerShell scripts instead. Summary Of all the maintenance tasks you perform the most critical one is the Backup Database Full task. Performing regular full backups is the only way you can guarantee that your data is protected should the original .
