Enable Maintenance Plan MSSQL 2005 Express

Hello,

I am running MSSQL 2005 Express in Windows 2003 Server. I am trying to create a Maintenance Plan. I click Management, and then only SQL server logs and activity monitor show up. I am told that I should see a folder called maintenance plans, and be able to right click to start the wizard. This is not the case though.

After looking through the help, I see that the user must be a member of the sysadmin group, which I am. The only thing I can think of, is that express doesnst support Maintenance Plans. Is this the case?

Thanks for the help

As SQL Express doesn't support SSIS (which is required for Maintenance Plans) you are correct, SQL Express doesn't support Maintenance Plans.

SQL Express also doesn't support SQL Agent which is what the Maintenance Plans use for scheduling.

You can write the T/SQL commands which the Mainenance Plan would generate and use the Windows Task Scheduler to schedule it to run.

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Ok, that explains it. Darn express.

I was able to get it working, via the following useful article:

http://www.brianmadden.com/content/article/How-to-Automate-the-Backup-of-a-SQL-Server-2005-Express-Data-Store

Simply follow the steps, create a script file, and then create a windows scheduled task with the command given, except change the instance name to the name of YOUR mssql instance.

Hope it helps others.

|||Yep, that would be the work around.