Chapter 8: Automation – Using Tools to Manage and Monitor SQL Server 2019

A lot of administrator tasks are executed regularly and it's inconceivable to run these tasks manually. SQL Server offers a dedicated service called SQL Server Agent, helping us to automate many common tasks. Along with this service, a very helpful tool called the maintenance plan was developed to support regular tasks that should be run against each database.

In this chapter, we will learn what SQL Server Agent is and how to set up this service from reliability and security perspectives. We will also set up Database Mail to keep a tab on things if they go wrong. We will also look at Maintenance Plans. A maintenance plan is a powerful tool that helps administrators decide on the tasks that are required to maintain healthy databases and protect databases from data loss and performance degradation. It has a relatively simple wizard that covers very complicated tasks.

SQL Server...