This book is a complete guide to setting up and maintaining maintenance plans for SQL Server Database Administrators. Maintenance plans too often consist of a backup task and that's it, but there is so much more that can and must be done to ensure the integrity of your most important company resource - the data you are tasked to manage and safeguard. This book walks even the newest of users through creating a powerful, automated maintenance plan.

Automate your job using SQL Server Agent to leverage the power of Maintenance Plans to deliver real, proactive solutions to common issues. Schedule common tasks such as backups and index rebuilds to run automatically, and get early-warning notifications of impending problems relating to resource usage and query performance. By the time your boss knows to call you about a problem, you'll have already called him to describe your solution.

The large majority of books never really cover the topic of inheriting a database server with multiple live databases; the common thread is that the databases will be created and maintained by the reader forever and ever. In the real world, that scenario rarely happens. Practical Maintenance Plans in SQL Server covers that scenario and provides you with the knowledge and tools needed to get comfortable writing your own maintenance plans for any SQL Server database, whether created by you or inherited.

• Shows the different tasks that can be run in a maintenance plan.
Explains how and why those tasks can be implemented.
• Provides a roadmap to creating your own custom maintenance plan.

Practical Maintenance Plans in SQL Server speaks directly to the need for database administrators to automate their workload and manage more databases than ever before. One key to doing that is automation, including automated early warnings of performance problems and database outages.
Practical Maintenance Plans in SQL Server sets a new standard for SQL Server Database Administrators by providing examples and explanations for the most-used yet least understood portion of database administration: the Maintenance Plans. The book directly enables database administrators to manage more databases with less effort. The book also enables a proactive approach in which administrators are not all the time scrambling to react in panic-mode when a problem occurs.