Question

Is there any way to programmatically execute (start) a SQL Server maintenance plan? We have a windows service that runs nightly and updates the DB with lots of data, once that is finished we would like to trigger a maintenance plan in the DB to start running.

Answer 1

You can start a job which is part of your maintenance plan by sp_start_job:

use msdb; 
go
exec dbo.sp_start_job N'job_name' ;
go