Kevin Hill looks at maintenance plan updates in SQL Server 2016:
True to my typical post style which focuses on small shops, accidental DBAs, and junior DBAs I went looking for something that could very easily benefit people that are using the basic SQL Server features. In this case they may not even realize how limited they were.
I chose to write about Index Maintenance in the built-in Maintenance Plan portion of SQL Server.
A brief summary of the built-in Maintenance Plans is that they allow you to drag-and-drop your way to basic SQL Server maintenance items such as Backups, Index maintenance, CheckDB, Statistics updating, etc. This a tool that has been around since at least version 7 that I know of. It wasn’t always very good, and it gets a bad rap from a lot of DBAs. It has been dramatically improved over the years in flexibility and reliability.
Read on for the changes. I’m really not a fan of maintenance plans, but if they’re going to exist, they should at least be as good as possible.