Simple play icon Course
Skills Expanded

SQL Server: Maintenance Plans

by Jonathan Kehayias

Learn how to properly configure and control essential SQL Server database maintenance using Maintenance Plans. This course is applicable to anyone responsible for SQL Server databases, with any level of SQL Server experience.

What you'll learn

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.

Table of contents

About the author

Jonathan Kehayias is a Principal Consultant with SQLskills. He is the youngest person ever to achieve the Microsoft Certified Master - SQL Server 2008 certification and has been a SQL Server MVP for many years. Jonathan is heavily involved in the SQL community; including being the top answerer on the MSDN Database Engine forum, writing deep technical content on his blog (plus his old blog, and answering questions as @SQLPoolBoy on Twitter. Jonathan is a performance tuning expert, both SQL Se... more

Ready to upskill? Get started