Overview
Maintenance plans keep your SQL Server healthy and performant. These plans consist of backing up databases, maintaining indexes, checking databases for corruption, and more. Maintenance plans work alongside SQL Server Agent, which allows you to schedule the maintenance plans to run daily, weekly, or monthly, depending on the requirements and needs.
Also, generally, DBAs are responsible for creating and scheduling SQL Server maintenance plans.
Explanation
In the Object Explorer, expand Management and look for the node called Maintenance Plans. If you right-click on Maintenance Plans, you have an option to use a wizard or design the plan yourself. Also, if you have existing maintenance plans, you will see them listed under Maintenance Plans.
Please note that you need to start SQL Agent to have a Maintenance Plan run on a set schedule.
Below is a screenshot when using the Maintenance Plan Wizard.
Additional Information
- Getting Started with SQL Server Maintenance Plans – Part 1
- Performing maintenance tasks in SQL Server
- SQL Server Maintenance Plan Index Rebuild and Reorganize Tasks
Haroon Ashraf’s deep interest in logic and reasoning at an early age of his academic career paved his path to become a data professional.
He holds BSc (Gold Medal) and MSc Degrees in Computer Science and also received the OPF merit award.
His programming career began in 2006 working on his first data venture to migrate and rewrite a public sector database driven examination system from IBM AS400 (DB2) to SQL Server 2000 using VB 6.0 and Classic ASP along with developing reports and archiving many years of data.
His work and interest revolves around Business Intelligence and Database Centric Architectures and his expertise include database and reports design, development, testing, implementation and migration.
He has recently earned “Knowledge Management and Big Data in Business” certificate from The Polytechnic University of Hong Kong.
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