Rebuilding Indexes Using SQL Server Maintenance Plan

dbtut January 4, 2019 MSSQL

We perform maintenance operations on SQL Server using Maintenance Plan. In this article I will describe the process of rebuilding indexes. I will share links to articles of other processes that can be done using the Maintenance Plan at the end of the article.

From the Management tab under SSMS, we select Maintenance Plans and Maintenance Plan Wizard as shown below.

On the next screen, select “Do not show this starting page again” as follows and click Next.

We give a name to the Maintenance Plan from the Name section as follows on the incoming screen. I named IndexRebuild.

Then click Change in the Schedule section. A screen appears as follows.

From Occurs you can choose Daily, Weekly or Monthly.

Select Daily if you want this maintenance plan to run daily
Select Weekly if you want this maintenance plan to run weekly
Select Monthly if you want this maintenance plan to run monthly

In the Schedule section, we click on Change to set it to run once every week on Sunday at 18:00.

On the next screen, we select Rebuild Index as follows and click next.

When we click “Select one or more” in the Databases section, the window appears just below.

If we select the All databases option, it will perform the rebuild of all databases.

If we select System databases, it will perform the rebuild of system databases.

If we select All user databases, it will rebuild all user databases.

We can select specific databases by selecting these databases. For example, in this example we will only perform rebuild for the Test database as follows.

If you select “Ignore databases is not online” option and a database is inaccessible during the rebuild process, it continues for the next database.

After selecting a specific database, you can select a specific table or view as you see on the screen below.

You must select the option from the Object section.

In the next screen, if you select “Write a report to a text file” as below, it will create a report in the folder you selected in Folder location.

If you select the E-mail report option, it will send the reports to the e-mail address you specified in the To: section.

Since I have no operator defined on my server, I got an error like the following.

There are no operators defined on the system.

You may want to read my article “How To Create An Operator On SQL Server” to get detailed information about the operator. Finish the process by clicking Next and Finish.