Brad’s Sure Guide to SQL Server Maintenance Plans- P15 ppsx

Completing the Wizard After completing the Select Report Options screen, click Next, and the Complete the Wizard screen, shown in Figure 3.17, displays all the tasks you have configured,

Figure 3.16: Since I am the only Operator, there are no other names to choose from.

As you will see, you can only select a single operator If you want to send Maintenance Plan reports to multiple users, you will need to have set up an operator that uses a group e-mail account, in which case each e-mail will be sent to every member of the group, each time the plan runs Note also that, just because you receive an e-mail report after a Maintenance Plan

executed, you shouldn't necessarily assume that the plan executed successfully You'll need

to delve into the details of the report to ensure that each task within the plan did, indeed, complete as expected

In Chapter 17, covering the Maintenance Plan Designer, we will discuss an alternative e-mail notification option that makes it easier to notify operators of problems with

Maintenance Plans

Completing the Wizard

After completing the Select Report Options screen, click Next, and the Complete the Wizard screen, shown in Figure 3.17, displays all the tasks you have configured, and also

allows you to drill down to see what options you have set I don't find this screen very useful,

as I already know what I just did

Figure 3.17: You can drill down into each of the tasks on this screen to see what settings

you have configured.

At this point, click on Finish to create the Maintenance Plan and reach the very last

Maintenance Wizard screen, as shown in Figure 3.18

Figure 3.18: Hopefully, you will see all successes.

The Wizard creates the Maintenance Plan, and the Maintenance Plan Wizard Progress

screen tells you if all the steps were successful If you see all successes, you are done, and can now test your Maintenance Plan

A Closer Look at Maintenance Plan Implementation

So, when you create a Maintenance Plan, what happens from an architectural point of view within SQL Server? In other words, how is the plan physically implemented? Each Maintenance Plan is implemented as a single SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) package There will be one Maintenance Plan SSIS package for every Maintenance Plan you create This package is executed using one or more scheduled SQL Server Agent jobs that are automatically created

We can view our new User Databases Maintenance Plan SSIS package by navigating to

the relevant Maintenance Plans directory To do this, open up SSIS from SSMS, navigate

to the Stored Packages folder, then open up the MSDB folder, and finally, open up the Maintenance Plans folder, as shown in Figure 3.19.

Connecting to SSIS

To be able to view the SSIS packages, the SSIS service must be installed and running on your server, and then manually connect to the SSIS service from within SSMS.

Figure 3.19: Viewing the new Maintenance Plan from within SSMS.

While you can view the Maintenance Plan SSIS packages from here, you can't view their contents or modify them here To do this, you must open them using the Maintenance Plan Designer, which we will cover in Chapters 16 to 19

you selected Separate schedules for each task, there will be a separate SQL Server Agent job

created for each of the scheduled tasks in your Maintenance Plan

To view the jobs created when you create a new Maintenance Plan, use SSMS to open up SQL Server Agent on your SQL Server, and then open up the Jobs folder Inside this folder, you

will see every job on your SQL Server, whether it is a Maintenance Plan job or not, as shown

in Figure 3.20

Figure 3.20: The name of your Maintenance Plan will be a part of the SQL Server

Agent jobs.

In Figure 3.20, you can see a lot of different jobs, but it is easy to spot the six Maintenance