Updating Statistics Using Maintenance Plan

dbtut January 9, 2019 MSSQL

We perform maintenance operations on SQL Server using Maintenance Plan. In this article I will describe the process of updating statistics. For more detailed information on statistics, I suggest you read my article “Statistics Concept and Performance Effect on SQL Server“. 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 Maintanance 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 UpdateStatistics.

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 00:00.

On the next screen, we select Update Statistics 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 update statistics of all databases.

If we select System databases, it will update statistics of system databases.

If we select All user databases, it will update statistics of all user databases.

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

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

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.