Chapter 22. Maintenance plans

After completing this chapter, you will be able to

  • Understand the importance of maintenance plans.

  • Check for database consistency.

  • Use the Maintenance Plan Wizard.

Maintenance plans are an essential part of ensuring database availability, consistency, and performance. Most plans include at least four steps:

  • Database backup and backup retention policy

  • Index maintenance

  • Statistics maintenance

  • Database consistency checking

At some point, these steps may run together on a daily basis, or they may run on an individual basis daily, weekly, monthly, or according to another schedule that satisfies the needs of your organization.

Prior chapters have focused on backups, index maintenance, and statistics maintenance, which are integral ...

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