Question : Setting up our Maintenance Plan on our new SQL 2008

I am setting up our Maintenance Plan(s) on our new SQL 2008 install.

I am wondering if any of you have reasons why I should consider another approach then what I am listing.

I was thinking something like the following should work...  (I will be checking All Databases when I set up these plans)

Monthly Maintenance Plan
- Check Database Integrity
- Shrink Database
- Reorganize Index
- Rebuild Index
- Update Statistics
- Clean Up History

Weekly
Maintenance Clean Up Task - (delete backup files older than 1 week)

Daily
- Check Database Integrity
- Back Up Database Full

Every 4 hours
Back Up Database (Transaction Log)

Am I on track?

I am not sure how I will divide points for this because it is almost a discussion with possibly no single correct answer but I am thinking I will be able to accept multiple comments or accept the comment(s) that really stands out as the right way to do this.

Regards,

Chris

Answer : Setting up our Maintenance Plan on our new SQL 2008

Monthly Maintenance Plan
- Check Database Integrity
- Shrink Database --- i dont do this
   When you shrink the database (or leave a DB in autoshrink, or schedule a job to perform shrinks),
   you are asking SQL Server to remove the unused space from your database's files.
   Deallocate that space and let the O/S do what it needs with it. If you have a growing database (as the majority of non-static databases tend to be), this means that that database will grow again. Depending on your autogrowth settings (another pet peeve for another post) this growth will probably be more than necessary and you will end up shrinking again... At best this is just extra work (shrink grow/shrink grow) and the resulting file fragmentation is handled alright by your I/O subsystem. At worse this is causing file fragmentation, interrupting what would have otherwise been contigous files and potentially causing I/O related performacne problems
- Clean Up History

Weekly
Maintenance Clean Up Task - (delete backup files older than 1 week)
      - Reorganize Index / Rebuild Index
      - Update Statistics
      * the above two can customised for some paricular table(s) and schelule as a daily task if you are doing some bulk operations
Daily
- Check Database Integrity
- Back Up Database Full  or a differential backup will be enough in case ur database is really big(in taht case the full db backup can be once or twise in a week )

Every 4 hours
Back Up Database (Transaction Log) --depends how much dataloss you can afford, i suggest a lesser value