Creating and editing maintenance plans

For DBAs who are not so familiar with SQL Server, the best starting point is a tool called a maintenance plan. We can think of the tool as a set of typical regular tasks that should be executed on every database hosted on our SQL Server instance. The maintenance plan itself can be created manually using the Maintenance Plan Design Surface or the Maintenance Plan Wizard, which is very good for ensuring that all the basic tasks needed to keep our database healthy are not missed.

The Maintenance plans node allows you to create one big sequence of many tasks scheduled together, but that is not desirable for most scenarios. For example, planning full backups and transaction log backups to be executed at the same time makes no sense. That is why a more common approach is to create one maintenance plan divided into subplans – units of work containing fewer tasks grouped together by their meaning. Subplans...