Summary

Establishing a database maintenance plan is important. Just like your car or your home, a database needs maintenance to keep working properly. The powerful features available with the SQL Server 2008 maintenance plans and Maintenance Plan Wizard make the creation of a robust maintenance plan relatively easy. If you establish your maintenance plans early in the life of your databases, you will save yourself time and aggravation in the long run.

Chapter 34 delves further into the importance of indexes and their relationship to performance. It expands on the optimization of indexes mentioned in this chapter and describes the role that indexes play in keeping databases running fast.