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Category: SQL Agent

Automated Alert Emails

Published 2019-07-29 by Kevin Feasel

Max Vernon shows how you can use the SQL Server Agent to send automated e-mails on alerts:

SQL Server Agent provides a great mechanism for sending alerts via email in response to various events. Once you’ve setup Database Mail, and configured a SQL Server Agent Operator, you should add alerts for severe errors that affect the health of your SQL Server. Creating Alerts can be tedious, but automating Alerts is simple, with the easy code below that automates creating alerts in response to critical events. Automating alerts is important because it provides a standardized Alert configuration that can be used by all the SQL Servers in your organization.

Read on for the script.

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Alerting When SQL Agent Jobs Fail

Published 2019-06-12 by Kevin Feasel

John Shaulis has a script to send out e-mail alerts on SQL Agent job failures:

Here we have a T-SQL statement that we can either create as a stored procedure or just run as T-SQL in a job step. It looks back over the last 10 minutes and looks for job failures. I would recommend scheduling this T-SQL to run every 5 minutes, you will get duplicate entries for a short period of time, but ideally, you shouldn’t get any failures anyway right? Plus once you’re notified, you can turn this off while you work on it or you can specify in the where clause to remove this job until fixed.

Click through for the script and do read the instructions.

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Replacing Text Across SQL Agent Jobs

Published 2019-05-02 by Kevin Feasel

Max Vernon shares a script to perform a find-and-replace across SQL Agent jobs:

Once in a while you might need to make common changes to a lot of SQL Server Agent Jobs. For example, if you change the path where you store SQL Server backup files, you might need to update many jobs to point at \\SERVERB\Backups instead of \\SERVERA\Backups. The script below provides a simple instance-wide find-and-replace for SQL Server Agent job-step commands. It modifies the command text for all jobs that contain the matching @Find parameter, replacing it with the provided @Replace value. You can exclude jobs by adding them to the list of values in the #excludeJobs table.

Click through for the script.

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Generating SSRS Subscription Agent Job Commands

Published 2019-02-12 by Kevin Feasel

Craig Porteous has a quick script to generate T-SQL commands to start and stop SQL Agent jobs tied to Reporting Services subscriptions:

This is a query I would run when I needed to quickly make bulk changes to Reporting Services subscriptions. It’s part of an “emergency fix” toolkit. 

Maybe a DB has went down and I have to quickly suspend specific subscriptions or locate Agent jobs for subscriptions. This was always a quick starting point.

I could take the generated Start, Enable and Disable commands and record these in tickets or email threads to demonstrate actions taken. There are other ways to make bulk changes to SSRS subscriptions involving custom queries but this can be run immediately, I don’t have to tailor a WHERE clause first. I also wrote previously on managing subscription failures.

Click through for the script.

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Auditing SQL Agent Jobs

Published 2019-01-18 by Kevin Feasel

Jason Brimhall has some clever techniques for auditing SQL Agent Jobs with Extended Events:

Once upon a time, I was in the position of trying to figure out why a job failed. After a bunch of digging and troubleshooting, it was discovered that the job had changed but nobody knew when or why. Because of that, I was asked to provide a low cost audit solution to try and at least provide answers to the when and who of the change.

Tracking who made a change to an agent job should be a task added to each database professionals checklist / toolbox. Being caught off guard from a change to a system under your purview isn’t necessarily a fun conversation – nor is it pleasant to be the one to find that somebody changed your jobs without notice – two weeks after the fact! Usually, that means that there is little to no information about the change and you find yourself getting frustrated.

Click through to see how Jason does it.

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ARITHABORT And SET Options

Published 2019-01-08 by Kevin Feasel

Jason Brimhall explains an error message he received:

INSERT failed because the following SET options have incorrect settings: ‘ARITHABORT’. 
Verify that SET options are correct for use with 
indexed views 
and/or indexes on computed columns 
and/or filtered indexes 
and/or query notifications 
and/or XML data type methods 
and/or spatial index operations.
[SQLSTATE 42000] (Error 1934). The step failed.


Immediately I started looking at my creation scripts for the tables.  Nope, no XML indexes, no spatial indexes, no filtered indexes, no indexes on computed columns (not even any computed columns),  and no query notifications.

In Jason’s case, it was an oddity around SQL Agent jobs, but there are a few reasons this could pop up, and Jason explains some of the most common.

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Disabling SQL Agent Jobs For Maintenance Periods

Published 2018-12-12 by Kevin Feasel

Jon Shaulis shows us a way to disable SQL Agent jobs with T-SQL:

A user had a unique issue where their system would have dynamically changing job names and schedules, but they need to disable and re-enable them during maintenance. Obviously, this is a huge headache.
I made a recommendation that they should ultimately create a list of currently enabled jobs that had a schedule using a system query.

SELECT *
FROM MSDB.dbo.sysschedules ss
     INNER JOIN msdb.dbo.sysjobschedules jss
ON jss.schedule_id = ss.schedule_id
WHERE ss.enabled = 1;
The code above returns all schedules that are paired to a job that are enabled. The enabled = 1 flag and the inner join to the sysjobschedules table are what dictate those filters.

Read on for more details about what’s going on and some caveats.

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Agent Job Cmdlets In dbatools

Published 2018-12-12 by Kevin Feasel

Garry Bargsley has a series looking at different cmdlets in dbatools.  Today’s focus is Agent jobs:

Agent Jobs are the heartbeat to most SQL Server environments.  Jobs are how we move data, purge data, automate processes, backup databases, perform database maintenance and many other functions.  Managing one SQL Server and the Agent Jobs can be a daunting task, much less managing 10, 20, 100 or more.  Luckily dbatools has you covered!!!  There are a wide range of commands that help you with Agent Jobs.  There are commands to Copy jobs, Find Jobs, Get Jobs, Create New Jobs, Remove Jobs, Set Jobs Settings, Start Jobs and Stop Jobs.  That is a huge range of functionality, so lets get started on the fourth day goodness.

Click through for descriptions and examples.

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Polling For File Existence In SQL Agent

Published 2018-10-22 by Kevin Feasel

Bill Fellows gives us an example of polling for a file change using SQL Agent:

A fun question over on StackOverflow asked about using SQL Agent with SSIS to poll for a file’s existence. As the comments indicate, there’s a non-zero startup time associated with SSIS (it must validate the metadata associated to the sources and destinations), but there is a faster, lighter weight alternative. Putting together a host of TSQL ingredients, including undocumented extended stored procedures, the following recipe could be used as a SQL Agent job step.

If you’re going to limit yourself to just SQL Server-based solutions and running on a frequent schedule isn’t enough, this is one of the better options.

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