I was recently in a conversation about the best way to go about setting up maintenance (Backups, Integrity Checks, Indexes and stats) for a group of SQL Servers, with minimal hassle, and easy to deploy to new servers.
The factors that came into play on this were:
- Supportability
- Cost
- Ease of use
We discussed the following different options (I was not talking to a DBA, but a SQL Developer):
- SQL Server Maintenance Plans
- Ola Hallengren’s scripts
- 3rd party products from Red Gate, Minion, etc.
- Custom scripts
For this customer, in this environment, I decided to recommend Ola’s scripts. The primary drivers were ease of installation and the amazing free support from the hundreds (thousands?) of DBAs that know and love them. Myself included.
But I still have to prove my point to this client no matter what I recommend…so I made this video.
Enjoy:
Skip to 5:00 if you already have SQL Server installed…that first bit is just to show this on a clean instance 🙂
If you have any questions, feel free to comment on the video, or if you need specific help hit up #sqlhelp on Twitter.
Thanks for reading and watching!