Beyond “Set and Forget”: Mastering the Ola Hallengren Maintenance Solution

The Ola Hallengren Maintenance Solution is installed on thousands of SQL Server instances, yet most environments rely on default jobs and hope for the best. While those defaults work, they rarely align with real-world workloads, availability requirements, or maintenance windows.

In this session, we’ll go beyond “set and forget” and break down how the Ola solution actually works—and how to tune it intentionally. You’ll learn how the backup, integrity check, and index maintenance procedures make decisions, and how to control that behavior using parameters, schedules, and execution context.

We’ll also explore the built-in logging tables and return codes, showing how to use them for troubleshooting, reporting, and automation—turning maintenance from a black box into an observable, auditable process.

You’ll leave with solid guidance on how to redesign existing Ola jobs into a flexible, scalable maintenance framework that supports performance, reliability, and growth—without rewriting everything from scratch.

Understand how Ola’s procedures make decisions and how to influence them safely with parameters and scheduling. Learn when to reorganize, rebuild, skip, or delay indexes based on fragmentation, size, and workload. Use logging and execution data to troubleshoot issues, prove success, and integrate with monitoring and automation tools.