Deleting Maintenance Plan History

dbtut January 10, 2019 MSSQL

We perform maintenance operations on SQL Server using Maintenance Plan. This article describes how to delete the maintenance plan history. 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 LogBackup.

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 Clean Up History as follows and click next.

When the following screen appears,

If we select “Backup and restore history”, it will delete the log history of the backup and restore operations before the specified date.

If you select “SQL Server Agent job history”, it deletes the log history of the running jobs before the specified date.

If you select “Maintenance plan history”, it deletes the log history of the maintenance plans before the specified date.

The time under the section “Remove historical data older than” determines how long the log of the options we selected above will be deleted.

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.