Category: SQL Agent

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.

David Fowler troubleshoots a nasty issue with the SQL Server Agent:

In a previous blog post: Duplicate Agent jobs – A good reason not to meddle with Msdb I explained a situation where someone was updating msdb tables manually rather than using the supplied system stored procedures such as msdb.dbo.sp_update_job, It would seem that this was not the only occasion where I would find myself in the midst of the meddlers’ medley.

This time around the meddler decided to disable the job using an update statement against the msdb.dbo.sysjobs table setting enabled from 1 to 0, you have no idea how long it took me to work that out!! but this lead me onto discovering more about the SQL server agent and its general behaviour.

Short form:  use the built in procedures to modify SQL Agent jobs rather than going off and updating tables on your own.  Click through for the long form, with plenty of interesting details.

Jason Brimhall shows us a quick method for changing SQL Agent job owners:

It is not unusual to find a server where some random user created a bunch of jobs to be run by SQL Agent. Sometimes, the user creating the job(s) sets themself as the owner of the job. There are certain cases where this behavior is hard to avoid like when creating a maintenance plan.

And of course, there are times when the user just doesn’t know any better. There is of course, the rare occasion when setting the job owner to be ones self makes the most sense -but that is few and far between in the grand scheme. Usually, you will want a non-expiring account such as a service account or a principal without “logon” permissions to be the owner.

The primary reason being simple – humans have an expiration date for every job they will ever have. When that expiration occurs, you may end up with any number of unwanted side effects. Unwanted side effects is exactly what we try to avoid in our jobs run via SQL Agent.

Click through for the script.  It’s also a good rule of thumb not to have your name attached to too many things; that way, your successor has no way of knowing you’re to blame for whatever awful hack is in place…

Tracy Boggiano shows how to distribute SQL Agent job runtimes for multi-server jobs using MSX/TSX:

First, you need to decide how many time blocks or hours you want the jobs to run in.  So let’s start with scenario one where you pick for example four time blocks.  First, you declare a variable with the time block in it and we will feed in the @@SERVERNAME to let determine a value for the time block that server will run.  Then we wrap our code around our time block, our example we will run Index Maintenance for a 12 period spread out for three hours.  Mind you for my index process which I probably should blog about as well I am processing one index at a time have something that BREAKs out of the procedure when it exceeds the time block it is.  So below we run Index Maintenace between start the index maintenance job on a server between the hours 6  PM and 5 AM based on the time block value we got back.

Click through for a sample.