Sql-server – What are pros and cons of Ola’s scripts vs using maintenance plan

ola-hallengrensql server

Will you please help me understand pros and cons of using Ola’s solution over maintenance plan? I have prepared a presentation based on SQL Pass (http://www.pass.org/DownloadFile.aspx?File=ebae1b31) which I will present.

I am also preparing few scenarios which Ola’s solution addresses and maintenance plan solution doesn’t. Can you all please help me explain this more technically?

By the way, we are managing almost 150+ servers (mix of 2008/2012/2014/2016) with Ola’s solution on at least 75% of them. I liked this article by Brent Ozar. But in one the comments, Brent has recommended to use script based solution for the number of servers we have. https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2012/04/maintenance-plans-roombas-suck-good-way/

Best Answer

I have written here

Maintenance plans are not bad, but when your environment grows, the limited flexibility and functionality that maintenance plans provide wont be sufficient.

To add more,

  • Ola's maintenance solution is widely accepted in the community and large organizations.
  • Its open sourced and issues can be raised at github/issues with a likelyhood of getting it fixed very fast.
  • Its flexible and scalable (even if you want to deploy it to 100s of servers just use Install-DbaMaintenanceSolution from dbatools.)
  • Microsoft took almost a decade to fix Maintenance plan GUI which was buggy itself :-)
  • has extensive documentation and FAQs and is constantly updated to accomodate newer sql server versions.
  • in preview version, you can even run backups in parallel.
  • for index maintenance solution, you can even time the process e.g. if it runs more than X amount of time, abort it.
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