Maintenance plans are kind of like GUI tools... They are great when they work, most of the time you can tell whether or not they worked, and they are really easy to use.

The problem comes where the rubber meets the road, when something breaks. Then you discover that the GUI tool didn't know or care about some marginal condition that has been happening for six months that has b0rked your environment to the point that you're not sure if much less how to recover back to the last known good state. Dont' get me wrong: features like GUI tools and Maintenance Plans are easy to use and they are great when you understand exactly how they work and what their limiatations are, but I won't bet the business/my job on them when the chips are down.

In the hands of someone that intimately knows both the Maintenance Plans and your environment, it takes about an hour to roll up a good solicd plan... You can roll up a decent plan that will work more often than not in fifteen minutes.

I'm a purist of the old school. I'm a firm believer that Mr. Murphy was an incurable optimist. I'd bet that you could manually write SQL scripts to do what you wanted, cope with errors the way you think it should, and would report things as you wished in less than a quarter of the time needed to get a maintenance plan implemented completely correctly to do the same job.

There are tools that I trust to "do the right thing" when it comes to backups and maintenance. Lightspeed comes right to mind. The stock maintenance plans don't measure up for me unless you understand exactly what they do, why they do it, what they report, and what you need to manually verify every time the plan runs. Very few if any people actually watch their maintenance plans that closely, and that somethimes frightens me!

-PatP