Within the object explorer in SQL Server management studio, open the management node and right click on the management plans and select maintenance plan wizard. Give your plan a name and then you can select what schedule or how often you want your plan to run. I'm just going to have my basic plan run every day at midnight starting immediately and with no end date.

Next, I will select the maintenance tasks I want to be performed within the plan. So once a day, I want to check the database integrity, shrink the database, rebuild indexes, update statistics, clean up backup, and restore historical data and do a full backup. This backup plan covers many of the tasks required to keep a database in an optimal operating state.

We are checking the database for any issues around the file structure and integrity. By rebuilding indexes and updating statistics, query performance will be maintained relative to the amount of data. Shrinking the database will free up system resources and possibly contribute to better performance. If possible, a daily full backup is also good from a disaster recovery point of view.

Next, you have the opportunity to specify what order you want the tasks to be performed by moving a task up the list. The wizard will take us through pages that let us set options for our selected tasks. Unfortunately, as you can see the maintenance plan wizard hasn't benefited from the 4K DPI support that other features of management studio have. Here, as with the other pages you can select which databases you want your plan tasks to be applied to. I'm just going through these pages with default settings and just select one database.

With the backup task, you can select the media to backup to and the destination. Because I've already selected full backup, the backup type is disabled. I'll get the wizard to create a sub-directory for each backup so that multiple databases go to separate folders. I'll just accept the defaults for the cleanup task, click Next, Next again and then Finish.

Now, if I go and double click on the basic plan I've just created, a nice graphic comes up showing the schedule and then the different steps with the various parameters. By right clicking on the plan in object explorer, I can execute it now. I'll just let that run and come back to it when it's finished. A maintenance plan is a type of job, so we can go to jobs underneath the SQL Server Agent node, right click and view job history. And we can see here, the job has been successfully executed although we already knew that.