Chapter 19: Create and Modify Maintenance Plans Using the Designer 266 Figure 19.15: In this example, each subplan has a single Maintenance Plan Task. If, instead, you selected the Single schedule for the entire plan or no schedule option in the Wizard, then there will only be a single subplan containing all of the Maintenance Plan tasks, as shown in Figure 19.16. Notice that the precedence arrows reflect the logical ordering you specified for the tasks, within the Wizard. Chapter 19: Create and Modify Maintenance Plans Using the Designer 267 Figure 19.16: Precedence was decided when you ordered the tasks from within the Maintenance Plan Wizard. Chapter 19: Create and Modify Maintenance Plans Using the Designer 268 Once you have a Wizard-created Maintenance Plan open within Designer, you can modify it in any way you like, just as if you were creating a Maintenance Plan from scratch. Make whatever changes you need, save the plan, test it, and you are ready to reuse it. As I promised, once you know how to use the Maintenance Plan Designer, modifying Maintenance Plans created with the Wizard is easy. Summary Having reached the end of this book, you should now have a good understanding of Maintenance Plans, how to create them using either the Maintenance Plan Wizard or the Maintenance Plan Designer, and the pros and cons of each approach. The Designer represents a steeper learning curve but the payoff is that it offers a lot more flexibility and power. It is my preferred tool, when creating Maintenance Plans. What I really want to restate and re-emphasize now is the advice I gave way back in Chapter 1: neither the Maintenance Plan Wizard nor Designer can do all your work for you. The Maintenance Plans you create using these tools offer a very convenient way to perform much of your database maintenance work, but they won't perform other important database maintenance tasks, such as those below. • Identifying and removing physical file fragmentation. • Identifying missing, duplicate, or unused indexes. • Protecting backups so that they are available when needed. • Verifying that backups are good and can be restored. • Monitoring performance. • Monitoring SQL Server and operating system error messages. • Monitoring remaining disk space. • And much, much more. The Wizard and Designer are useful tools for many DBAs, especially when maintaining smaller databases that are not regarded as mission-critical and so have less rigorous maintenance requirements. Chapter 19: Create and Modify Maintenance Plans Using the Designer 269 If Maintenance Plans meet your needs for a given set of databases, then use them. If they don't meet your needs well, then don't use them. Custom-created T-SQL or PowerShell scripts will offer much more power and flexibility. There is a steeper learning curve attached to creating custom scripts, but it is knowledge that you will be able to use elsewhere as a DBA, and it won't go to waste . restored. • Monitoring performance. • Monitoring SQL Server and operating system error messages. • Monitoring remaining disk space. • And much, much more. The Wizard and Designer are useful tools. The Maintenance Plans you create using these tools offer a very convenient way to perform much of your database maintenance work, but they won't perform other important database maintenance. power. It is my preferred tool, when creating Maintenance Plans. What I really want to restate and re-emphasize now is the advice I gave way back in Chapter 1: neither the Maintenance Plan Wizard