To imagine an administrator's world without automation is really hard. SQL Server provides a very comprehensive set of tools and techniques to achieve comfortable regular administration and reduce administration to non-regular monitoring or troubleshooting actions.
In the first part of this chapter, we went through Database Mail and SQL Server Agent setup. The main point here is to have Database Mail and mainly SQL Server Agent running all the time when SQL Server runs.
In the second part, we paid attention to Maintenance Plans, a very useful tool to create a base set of automatic SQL Server administration. We realized that maintenance plans are dividable into smaller subplans, which can be executed on their own schedules.
The last part of the chapter was dedicated to show, in the form of examples, all traditional objects maintained by SQL Server Agent--jobs, alerts...
