What should be the maintenance plan for the SQL database?

• A. Archive Old Data
• B. Update Statistics
• C. Defragment
• D. Check, Rebuild, and Backup

Answer: (D)

A solid SQL maintenance plan centers on three ideas: keeping data accurate, keeping performance strong, and ensuring you can recover from problems. Checking the database integrity (such as running consistency checks) detects corruption or issues early, preventing silent problems from growing unnoticed. Rebuilding indexes helps remove fragmentation and keeps query performance high by ensuring the optimizer has good statistics to work with. Regular backups create a safety net so you can restore data after a failure, corruption, or accidental changes.

While archiving old data can help with storage and performance, and updating statistics or defragmenting can improve performance, none of those alone guarantees both data integrity and recoverability. The combination of integrity checks, index maintenance, and backups provides a comprehensive and reliable maintenance approach.