1. Sql Saturday Philadelphia
Beginner’s Guide for Maintenance Plans

2. About Aspect Consulting
Founded in 1994; specializing in helping clients increase revenue and decrease expenses in through:
Application Design and Architecture: Full life cycle development of custom applications; logical and physical design; application performance tuning, troubleshooting, and support
Data Management: Data Warehouse Development; Business Intelligence, Dashboard Reporting solutions.
Database Administration: Both onsite and remote. Assess and improve database performance and stability; ensure backup and recovery strategies are sound.
Technical Staffing: providing right fit staff at the right time in all IT and engineering disciplines. 2

3. Agenda Why use Maintenance Plans? Review the tasks
Adding tasks for the Maintenance Plan
Connecting the tasks
Adding Subplans
Other Configuration Notes / Gotchas
Questions 3

4. Why use Maintenance Plans?
Where are your backup plans?
Take the guess work away:
Are they stored in SSIS packages?
Are they part of t-sql statements in a job?
Are they coded into stored procedures?
Are they non-existent?
Benefit:
All tasks are located in one centralized area
Gives you a visual representation of the backup strategy and processes.
Allows extended logging 4

5. Tasks we can use in a Maintenance Plan
Maintenance plans can be created for a lot of different tasks. I’ll be demonstrating the top 7.
Check database integrity
Backup database
History clean up
Maintenance clean up
Reorganize Indexes
Update statistics
Notify operator
Rebuild Indexes
Execute T-SQL statement
Execute Sql Server Agent Job
Shrink database 5

6. Check Database Integrity
Allows you to specify the database. You can ignore those databases that are off-line.
By default, includes indexes and physical only.
You have the option of checking integrity on tablock/max degree of parallelism
Tablock – While checking integrity will obtain locks on the tables instead of using an internal database snapshot.
Max Degree of Parallelism – restricts the number of processors used for parallel execution plans. 6

7. Backup database task
Allows you to specify the database. You can also ignore those databases that are off-line.
Allows for full, differential, and transaction log backups.
Will create different sub-directories for each database, if specified.
You can specify copy-only databases or use backup encryption. Note: the Copy-only database checkbox has been around since Sql Server 2012.
Perform checksum note – disk related, makes database backup process longer.
Verify Only – already performs a checksum, availability of free space in destination place, header fields on database pages, readable state of all volumes and the backup state. 7

8. History Clean Up / Maintenance Clean Up Tasks
Allows you to clean up data stored in the database, such as sql server agent job history, backup/restore history, and maintenance plan history for a certain timeframe.
Allows you to delete certain types of files from a folder based on the age of the file. 8

9. Reorganize Indexes
Allows you Reorganize your indexes to reduce fragmentation.
You can specify:
Compact Large objects
Fragmentation %
Page count
When the index was last reorganized 9

10. Update Statistics
Allows you to specify the database. You can ignore those databases that are off-line.
Starting in 2017, allows for a specific selection in order to drill-down into the tables/views.
Gives you the ability to update all existing statistics, column stats only, or index stats only.
You can do a full scan or a sample. 10

11. Notify Operator
Allows you specify an operator to notify whether the MP failed, succeeded or completed. 11

12. Trouble-shoot issues with MPs
Use reporting/logging tool
You can send the information to a text file or send the report in an .
You can log extended information which gives you more information in order to trouble-shoot the problems. 12

13. Demonstration 13

14. Screen shots 14

15. Screen shots 15

16. Screen shots 16

17. Screen shots 17

18. Other configuration notes
Test your Maintenance Plans once you’ve spoken with your business or client to figure out your RPO/RTO (Recovery Point Objective/Recovery Time Objective)
You have mail configured properly in order to use the notify operator task
Service Accounts have privileges to the folders (SAN backup device) 18

19. Gotcha
Do not create additional job steps in Sql Agent for a MP because….
Once you save the MP again, those job steps disappear.
Instead: Use the tasks within the MP to re-create those job steps.
If you clone a server, disable all MP jobs because…
The MP points to the old server and will continue to create backups on the old server.
Instead: re-create the MPs on the new cloned server and/or use Integration services to export/import MPs to new server {another class} 19

20. Contact Information
Tracey Nelson
x220
Linked In profile:
09a046b2
Go over to SSMS
Show them the backup database task item 20

21. Questions 21