A short history of the Automated Maintenance Tasks in Oracle

Predefined Automatic System Tasks were introduced in Oracle 10g, and consisted of two jobs:

1. Automated statistics collection
2. The Automated segment space advisor

Two scheduler jobs were set up by default to run these automated tasks: The GATHER_STATS_JOB and the AUTO_SPACE_ADVISOR_JOB.

You could enable or disable the jobs using the procedures enable or disable in the dbms_scheduler package:

EXECUTE DBMS_SCHEDULER.ENABLE('GATHER_STATS_JOB');
EXECUTE DBMS_SCHEDULER.DISABLE('GATHER_STATS_JOB');

In Oracle 11g, Oracle redesigned the the Automatic System Tasks and introduced the concept of Automated Maintenance Tasks.
At the same time, a third automated task was introduced: The Automated SQL Tuning advisor.

Oracle removed the GATHER_STATS_JOB and AUTO_SPACE_ADVISOR_JOB altogether and instead introduced a new package called DBMS_AUTO_TASK_ADMIN.

To enable or disable an Automatic tasks using DBMS_AUTO_TASK_ADMIN, see this short post.

To check the status of your automated maintenance tasks, see this post.