SQL Server Maintenance Plan – Rebuild Index Task Gotcha on SQL Server 2005 Standard

Here's one to watch out for if you are setting up a SQL Server 2005 Maintenance Plan on SQL Server 2005 Standard edition

SQL Server 2005 supports online rebuilding of indexes on Enterprise Edition Only

The Task wizard for setting up the Rebuild Index Task has an option Keep index online while reindexing even when connected to Standard Edition.

No warnings are given when setting up a task with this option enabled, but when the maintenance plan executes, the error Online index operations can only be performed in Enterprise edition of SQL Server will be generated for each index - and indexes will not be recreated.

As a side note, make sure you do have the Generate a text file report option ticked within Reporting and Logging  settings for the job, as the information given within the SQL job History Log is limited to The job failed

As a side side note, its definitely worth checking that your SQL Agent email alerts are functioning correctly if you have them set to notify on failure, as otherwise an issue like this can go completely un-noticed (apart from performance issues), as the rest of the tasks within the plan will probably succeed (like backups being generated) - which is certainly the main thing I have always checked after setting up a maintenance plan...