Microsoft® SQL Server 2012 Unleashed

Scheduling a Maintenance Plan

One of the greatest features of a maintenance plan is that you can schedule it. Scheduling takes manual work off your plate and provides consistency that might be missed if the plan had to be run manually. History is kept for each of the scheduled executions, which provides an audit trail, and notifications can be tied to the scheduled plans to allow a user to respond to failures or other results from the plan.

A schedule can be created for an entire maintenance plan, or individual schedules can be created for each task in the plan. The scheduling selection is available on the Select Plan Properties screen, which is one of the first screens displayed while using the Maintenance Plan Wizard (refer to Figure 29.1