Brad’s Sure Guide to SQL Server Maintenance Plans- P50 docx

Chapter 19: Create and Modify Maintenance Plans Using the Designer
246
you're ready to start using it.
Add the Maintenance Plan Tasks
At this point, we have three subplans, each with its own design surface. Our next task
is to drag and drop the appropriate Maintenance Plan tasks to the design surface of the
appropriate subplan. Let's consider each subplan in turn.
Daily Full Backup Subplan
According to the goals of our overall plan, this subplan should contain:
• One Back Up Database task, to perform the full backup of AdventureWorks.
• One Notify Operator task, to notify the operator, should the full backup fail.
Highlight the Daily Full Backup subplan and then drag each of these two tasks from the
Toolbox and drop them on the design surface, as shown in Figure 19.3.
Chapter 19: Create and Modify Maintenance Plans Using the Designer
247
Figure 19.3: The Daily Full Backup subplan now has the necessary Maintenance
Plan Tasks.
Note, of course, that although we've now added the appropriate tasks, they are not yet
configured. We will do this later, after adding the required tasks to the other two subplans.
Hourly Log Backup Subplan
According to our goals, this subplan should contain:
• One Back Up Database task – to perform hourly backups of the transaction log for the
AdventureWorks database.
• One Notify Operator task – to notify the DBA, should the transaction log backup fail.
Chapter 19: Create and Modify Maintenance Plans Using the Designer
248
The resulting design surface should look as shown in Figure 19.4.
Figure 19.4: Notice that the Hourly Log Backup subplan now looks like the Daily Full
Backup subplan.
In their unconfigured states, the Daily Full Backup and the Hourly Log Backup subplans
look identical. Later, when we configure them, we will specify one to do a full backup and one

to do a transaction log backup.
Weekly Maintenance Subplan
Finally, we need to add Maintenance Plan tasks to our most complex subplan, the Weekly
Maintenance subplan. Based on our database maintenance plan goals, we will need to add
the Maintenance Plan Tasks below to the Weekly Maintenance subplan.
Chapter 19: Create and Modify Maintenance Plans Using the Designer
249
• One Check Database Integrity task – to check the integrity of AdventureWorks.
• One Rebuild Index task – to rebuild all of the indexes in AdventureWorks.
• One History Cleanup task – to remove old backup, job, and maintenance plan history
data from msdb.
• Three Maintenance Cleanup tasks – each instance of this task can only delete one file
type, so we need a total of three instances in order to delete older BAK, TRN, and report
TXT files.
• Seven Notify Operator tasks – one instance for each of the previous six Maintenance
Plan tasks, to let the operator know if the task failed, plus an extra instance to let the
operator know that the entire subplan succeeded.
The resulting design surface would look similar to that shown in Figure 19.5.
Chapter 19: Create and Modify Maintenance Plans Using the Designer
250
Figure 19.5: The Weekly Maintenance subplan is the most complex of the three.