Brad's Sure Guide to SQL Server Maintenance Plans

Millions of SQL Server instances run in the offices of small and medium-sized organizations and there are many "accidental" DBAs out there whose job it is to maintain them. Often, they find that they don't have the knowledge, experience, or critically the time, to perform the correct level of maintenance on their SQL Server databases, much as they might like to. This can mean poor performance and reduced availability. Regardless of the size of your organization, if your mission critical data becomes unavailable, then business will suffer greatly.

The Maintenance Plan Wizard and Designer allow you to configure and schedule eleven core database maintenance tasks, ranging from integrity checks, to database backups, to index reorganizations and rebuilds. Brad walks through every one of these tasks covering:

• The intent of each task and why it's important
• How to configure each task and what all the options mean
• Scheduling considerations: when and how often should you run the task?
• Customizing and extended your Maintenance Plans using the Designer

Used carefully, these Maintenance Plan tools represent powerful time-saving devices for any DBA. At each stage of the book, Brad explains clearly the correct and incorrect uses for the tool, and indicates where more advanced solutions, using T-SQL or PowerShell scripting, would be more appropriate.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 01: Why is Database Maintenance Important?
• Chapter 02: Before you Create any Maintenance Plans
• Chapter 03: Getting Started with the Maintenance Plan Wizard
• Chapter 04: Task Scheduling
• Chapter 05: Check database Integrity Task
• Chapter 06: Shrink Database Task
• Chapter 07: Rebuild Index Task
• Chapter 08: Reorganize Index Task
• Chapter 09: Update Statistics Task
• Chapter 10: Execute SQL Server Agent Job Task
• Chapter 11: History Cleanup Task
• Chapter 12: Define Back Up Database (Full) Task
• Chapter 13: Define Back Up Database (Differential) Task
• Chapter 14: Back Up Database (Transaction Log) Task
• Chapter 15: Maintenance Cleanup Task
• Chapter 16: Using the Maintenance Plan Designer