If you’ve worked with Microsoft SQL Server for any period of time, you are familiar with the SQL Server Agent. The Agent, which remains mostly unchanged since I started working with in 1999, is a fairly robust job scheduler that can also alert you in the event of job failures or system errors. I feel as though it’s a testament to the quality of the original architecture that the code hasn’t changed very much–it still meets the needs of about 90-95% of SQL Server workloads, based on an informal twitter discussion I had a few months ago. There are some cases where an enterprise scheduling tool is needed, but for maintaining most SQL Servers and executing basic ETL, the agent works fine. There’s one problem–the agent is only available in SQL Server and Azure SQL Managed Instance.
Read on to learn about those options.