Summary
To imagine an administrator's world without automation is almost impossible. SQL Server provides a very comprehensive set of tools and techniques to use 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 configured and SQL Server Agent running all the time when SQL Server runs.
In the second part, we looked at Maintenance Plans, a useful tool to create a basis for automatic SQL Server administration. We realized that Maintenance Plans are divisible into smaller subplans, which can be executed on their own schedules.
The third part of the chapter was dedicated to showing, by example, all the traditional objects maintained by SQL Server Agent – jobs, alerts, and operators.
The last part explained the security model of a job execution...
