Maintenance plans - Feedback please !

Many thanks to all of you, for taking time to post feedback in this forum.
We consider all feedback valuable and we use it to make
the product better meet the needs of our customers.
Recently, there were several postings related to the Maintenance plans feature,
which let us know we had some problems in this area. We categorized
the postings into 2 buckets

#1. Dependency on SSIS(SQL Server Integration Service), for Maintenance
plans to execute successfully

For SP1, Maintenance plans will run successfully if tools or SSIS is
installed on the same machine where the SQL Server relational engine is .

This dependency is part of the core design of maintenance plans and
not something easily fixed in a service pack.

#2. Clean-up tasks do not clean files in sub-directories

The workaround of having multiple clean-up tasks for each folder OR
having the back-up task back-up databases to the same folder was suggested
but the feedback came back loud and clear that this was not an acceptable
workaround.

The correct fix is to provide the option to clean-up files under each
sub-directory of a given directory.

Please note that with this fix, clean-up task will still behave a little
different from the behavior of SQL2000 clean-up tasks . In SQL2000, cleanup
tasks would clean up back-up files for the set of databases that were backed
by its back-up task. Effectively, back-up and clean-up were a single task.
In SQL2005, clean-up tasks are separate from back-up tasks;
its functionality is to delete back-up files under a given folder.

If we fix these two issues as described, will you be happy maintenance plans user
and feel it is a reasonable feature without any major shortcomings from SQL 2000?
Please post your feedback here and feel free to email at gdwarak@.microsoft.com

Thanks,
Gops Dwarakanathan

Even with the changes you outlined, I still wouldn't be a "happy maintenance plan user". It currently requires a lot more effort to create a maintenance plan in SQL Server 2005 than it did in SQL Server 2000.

I've counted keystrokes, and it takes about 3 times as many keystrokes to build a maintenance plans in SQL Server 2005 to our company's standards. The main reason is that with SQL Server 2000, you could create multiple schedules for a single maintenence plan. Whereas with SQL 2005, you must create separate maintenence plans for each schedule. We want full backups, txn log backups, optimizations, and integrity checks to all run at different times on their own reoccurring schedules. With SQL Server 2000 this was simple to do, but with SQL Server 2005 it is not.

It would be nice if there was a wizard (similar to SQL Server 2000's) that would allow you to enter all the pertinent information - including multiple schedules - and would build the SSIS based maintenance plan(s) for you.

With over 600 databases at our company, the amount of time spent creating and maintaining maintenance plans is MUCH higher with SQL Server 2005 than it was with SQL Server 2000.

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We are watching all maintenance plan requests/feedback more closely and will evaluate and consider them for our our next service release.

We would highly encourage to provide every feedback through MSDN Product Feedback Center which can be accessed from Management Studio by selecting “Send Feedback” menu item under “Community” Menu or by going directly to the link http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/

By using this channel, you could log bugs directly or browse over the existing bugs that correspond to the issue you are running into and vote the importance of the fix for that bug. Our team constantly watches the incoming bugs and goes over the importance of the bug to be addressed based on number of voters and the rating of how important the fix is needed.

Thank you and we appreciate your feedback.

Gops Dwarak