SQL Server: Maintenance Plans

Proper database maintenance is critical for making sure that database workloads perform as well as possible. One of the simplest ways to implement database maintenance is to use the built-in Maintenance Plan functionality to schedule the critical database maintenance tasks - backups, consistency checking, statistics maintenance and index maintenance. The course starts by explaining how to configure Database Mail, and Operator, and alerts, all within SQL Server Agent. It then describes all the commonly-required maintenance tasks and shows how to configure them, along with do's and don'ts, plus some of the less commonly used tasks. After that it shows how to pull these tasks together into Maintenance Plans using the Maintenance Plan Wizard, the Maintenance Plan Designer, and through Integration Services packages. Finally the course discusses some of the alternative methods of implementing database maintenance through freely-available scripts. This course is perfect for anyone who is responsible for SQL Server databases, with any level of experience, from SQL Server 2005 onward.