DBA Tasks ( SQL Server 2008 ) - Recommendation - Maintenance plan

Question

I'm a JR DBA on a big company. I was hired 6 months ago, and I'm learning things really fast (I'm the only DBA here).

The old DBA left servers and SQL Server instances for me, to take care of it.

It's a really awesome structure (cluster and etc).

But, he was using scripts and a lot of programming to make backups, cleanup tasks, and all other DBA tasks. Everything is good. I am fixing some things here and there but everything is really good.

I'm learning SQL Server all by myself, and I was reading about MAINTENANCE PLAN.

It's a good pick to use it? If I was hired on a new company, it's a good pick to use maintenance plan ( for me, looks like too "simple", don't want to look a bad DBA).

Thanks.

(For complement, he uses a script to put database names on a table, and then he uses scripts to seek that table and use it on jobs. I can do this with a simple maintenance plan. But he was a Senior DBA. he told me that he likes it, and it's not a problem to use maintenance plan. I just want some opinions)

Answer 1

It's a good pick to use it? If I was hired on a new company, it's a good pick to use maintenance plan ( for me, looks like too "simple", don't want to look a bad DBA).

Maintenance plans are not bad, but when your environment grows, the limited flexiblity and functionality that maintenance plans provide wont be sufficient.

For e.g Maintenance plans suffer from below drawbacks :

• There is no CHECKSUM option when taking backup of databases or there is no option of verifying backups using CHECKSUM.
• There is not much logic you can implement when dealing with index fragmentation and once you configure it, they run regardless if you really need a reorg or rebuild on your indexes... and many more :-)

I highly recommend to use Ola's backup solution (and Index maintenance solution as well).