For DBAs who are not so familiar with SQL Server, the best starting point is a tool called Maintenance Plan. We can think of the tool as a set of typical regular tasks that should be executed on every database hosted on our SQL Server instance. The Maintenance plan itself can be created manually using Maintenance plan designer or Maintenance plan wizard, which is very good for our assurance that all the basic tasks needed to keep our database healthy are not missed.
Maintenance plans allow you to create one big sequence of many tasks scheduled together, but it is not desirable for most scenarios. For example, planning full backup and transaction log backups to be executed at the same time makes no sense. That's why a more common approach is to create one maintenance plan divided into subplans--units of work containing fewer tasks grouped together by their...