Agent Jobs and Maintenance Plans

  • I am working on a new system and see agent jobs but no maintenance job associated with it. I thought you needed one to one or am I incorrect. The agent jobs seem to work with no maintenance plan

  • SQL Server Agent is a general purpose scheduling tool bundled with SQL Server.  If you use maintenance plans, it will create a SQL Server Agent job for you related to the maintenance plan, but not all SQL Server Agent jobs need to be a maintenance plan.
    https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/ssms/agent/sql-server-agent
    It's a great tool for automating many database related items.  Also, I think a number of people will agree with me, that maintenance plans may be the easiest to setup but are probably not the best way to do regular maintenance on your database instances.  There are a number of free tools that can assist you with performing regular maintenance such as:
    https://ola.hallengren.com/
    http://www.minionware.net/

  • thanks much for the info

  • An Agent job and a maintenance plan are two distinct things. You can create a  maintenance plan with no schedule. In that case there will be no job. You can create a job to launch a number of different things such as SSIS, T-SQL, etc.
    A Job contains steps and schedules.  Steps are of the types above. Schedules are what launch the step(s) at the scheduled time.

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