difference between logshipping and maintanance plans

Question

hi sir,

     plz what  is the exact difference between log shipping and maintanance plans in sql server.

 Regrards:

bhaskar

  

Answer 1

Hi,

There's not really too much in common between them.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms187103.aspx - log shipping

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms187658.aspx - maintenance plans

Log shipping is primarily used for disaster recovery, or providing a standby reporting database.  Maintenance plans let you create a workflow of tasks that help ensure a database is optimized, consitent and backed up.  A lot of people use alternatives to SQL Servers built in maintenance plans, like Ola Hallengren's utilities: http://ola.hallengren.com/

What are your requirements?

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Thanks, Andrew

Answer 2

Hi Bhaskar,

These are completely two different subjects as we should not go for difference between two. Please have a look at below description to see what is the purpose.

Maintenance Plans are used for basic maintenance activities like backups, index fragmentation maintenance, stats update etc. You can schedule the plan to run on a specified schedule.

While Log shipping is technology, which is mainly for DR purpose. It takes log backup from primary server and applies that log to secondary server database periodically. Secondary server database will be in restoring mode by default and if any disaster happens, you can point applications to secondary server.

Hope this description helps. 

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- Chintak (My Blog)

Answer 3

I believe your confusion is caused by the fact that both of these things perform some sort of backup.

However, as the other members already pointed out here, there's no real resemblance between the two.

Specifically:

Log Shipping performs transaction log backups on the primary server, and restores them on the secondary server(s).

Using Maintenance Plans you can create backup plans for your databases (transaction log, full and differential), and perform other tasks such as consistency checks and index defragmentation.

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Eitan Blumin; SQL Server Consultant - Madeira SQL Server Services; http://www.madeira.co.il/author/eitan/