Microsoft® SQL Server 2012 Unleashed

Maintenance Without a Maintenance Plan

You can perform database maintenance without the use of the built-in maintenance plans that come with SQL Server. The additional complexity in SQL Server 2012 may steer some people away from the use of these plans. In addition, these plans cannot be easily scripted, so deployment to multiple environments is not straightforward.

Database maintenance that is performed without a maintenance plan is often performed using custom scripts or stored procedures that execute the T-SQL commands to perform the maintenance. Other methods include manually executing the SQLMAINT utility to perform various maintenance tasks such as database backups and consistency checks. Often these maintenance commands or custom scripts ...