DBCC CHECKDB Notification There are plenty of questions on DBA.SE regarding DBCC CHECKDB and how to resolve problems when errors are returned. My specific question is on actually getting notified that DBCC CHECKDB returned errors. Most all DBAs know that you can automate the command and should run it often.

I came across this article by Cindy Gross, which has some very good notes. In it she mentions use of SQL Server Agent that if it finds errors from the execution of the CHECKDB command it will fail that step (or job depending on configuration). She points to Paul Randal's blog post on the topic here.

Now I am curious if anyone knows that the Check Database Integrity Task in a maintenance plan would do the same thing? MSDN does not mention that it will and I have not truthfully been an environment where it has come across a corruption issue; so can't say that it does. This would be versus simply setting up a SQL Agent Job with multiple steps that runs the specific command against each database, as Cindy suggested.

Thoughts? Obviously proof is in the pudding so providing more than just a guess would be helpful...
The Check Database Integrity Task provided in the maintenance plan issue DBCC CHECKDB WITH NO_INFOMSGS on the database selected. You can view its command by clicking the view-SQL in the task setup. If you doubt the generated SQL command, you can use SQL profiler to see its SQL command. If corruption was found, the agent job with this maintenance task will generate error and fail (with proper job step setup).



One thing to point out, running DBCC CHECKDB is equal as performing DBCC CHECKALLOC, DBCC CHECKTABLE, DBCC CHECKCATALOG and other validation. If you are running DBCC CHECKDB, you do not have to run them separately. Running them separately usually is to perform specific integrity check or need to spread out the integrity check to smaller task due to limited time to perform entire DBCC CHECKDB. More information can be found here on MSDN.