On August 23, Jed Wilson (blog | twitter) gave an excellent overview of using Ola Hallengren's maintenance routines as an alternative to SQL Server's Maintenance Plans.

Jed covered:

• overview
• installation options
• installed components (table, SP's, functions, SQL Agent jobs) 
• backup scripts (Full and simple recovery modes)
• verification
• index optimization (rebuild, reorg, update stats)
• Feature comparison between Ola's and Maintenance Plans
• a Power Shell script for backing up SSAS databases

I particularly liked how he showed us a standard DBA Admin table and naming conventions for consistency from environment to environment in a multi-location/multi-server shop.

He gave a great tip to do Transaction Log backups every three minutes during Index Rebuild operations to keep the transaction log size at a more consistent size.

Ola generously provided Jed with additional resources, demo scripts, and a supplemental Power Point slide deck.