Andy Levy manages some SQL Agent entries:
Thank you to everyone who contributed to this month’s T-SQL Tuesday!
Here’s a roundup of the posts.
Read on for nine posts on the topic of managing SQL Agent jobs.
Leave a CommentCategory: T-SQL Tuesday
Chad Callihan shares a pair of tips:
These aren’t the most technical SQL Server Agent job topics, but two that came to mind were managing who jobs belong to and making sure the right steps are followed when jobs are removed.
Click through for more thoughts on both of these topics.
Leave a CommentDavid Wiseman shows off an open-source product:
For T-SQL Tuesday #186, Andy Levy asks, “How do you manage and/or monitor your SQL Server Agent jobs?”
This is a great opportunity for me to discuss how DBA Dash can help monitor SQL Agent jobs. DBA Dash is a free and open-source monitoring tool for SQL Server, created by me. It’s used to monitor thousands of SQL Server instances within Trimble alone, and it’s gaining popularity in the SQL Server community.
Read on to see how the product can help if you have a series of SQL Agent jobs.
Leave a CommentI used to work in a fairly large enterprise (5,000+ people, 500+ production SQL instances) with a small staff. It was 2-3 of us to manage all these systems, as well as respond to questions/queries/issues with dev/test systems. As a result, we depended heavily on SQL Agent.
We decided on a few principles which helped us manage jobs, with a (slow) refactoring of the existing jobs people randomly created with no standards. A few of the things we did are listed below. This isn’t exhaustive, but these are the main things I remember.
Read on for Steve’s list.
Leave a CommentTodd Kleinhans does not believe that green is good:
Far too many times, I have seen DBA(s) and others have this false sense that if the Agent run status shows green, then everything must be ok.
Click through for a funny story about a gas station robbery and examples of how a SQL Agent job can report success but actually fail. You also see this a lot with replication or tasks that are asynchronous in nature: the task is reporting that we successfully started whatever operation, but that doesn’t mean the operation itself succeeded.
Leave a CommentDeborah Melkin has three laws for robots, or at least SQL Agent jobs:
How do I manage this all?
I have scripts to create and modify SQL Agent jobs.
And those scripts get checked into source control.
And those scripts get added to the deploy process.
And most importantly, those scripts get tested in all environments from development through production.
Read on for more context around this.
Leave a CommentRob Douglas doesn’t want to click the button a second time:
Recently, someone made an off the cuff comment about using TSQL Tasks in Maintenance Plans to handle more complex logic that SQL Agent handled out of the box. I was briefly excited by the prospect of building improved logic flows directly into SQL Server Maintenance Plans. This months Andy Levy hosts TSQL Tuesday and asks us about how we handle SQL Agent Jobs and this seemed like a great opportunity for me to share a story about how I wasted an afternoon testing a few components I have a passing knowledge with, attempting to implement auto-healing and conditional logic flow, only to snap out of it a few hours later when I realized that I was trying to solve a problem that someone else cracked nearly 2 decades ago.
Click through for the example. Some people might think of this kind of spelunking as a waste of time. My counter-argument is that it is better to know three ways of doing a thing versus one, as inevitably, you’ll run into the situation in which the one way is either not workable or is such a bad option that it’s painful to implement.
Leave a CommentAndy Levy wants a picture or at least a thousand words:
If you don’t have a monitoring suite watching SQL Agent, or you want to get a bigger picture view of when and how your Agent jobs are running,
dbatoolscan help you shortcut getting this information.Get-DbaAgentJobHistorydoes exactly what its name suggests – it fetches the execution history for one or more Agent jobs on one or more SQL Server instances. Thing is…it can produce a lot of output if you’re not careful.
Read on to see how you can use this to generate a visual indicator of when your jobs are running and how they fare.
Leave a CommentDeborah Melkin casts a wide net:
There were a lot of themes that I noticed throughout everyone’s posts. First were the number of people who mentioned that mentoring doesn’t have to be formal or even a 1:1 relationship. Mentoring isn’t just for adults and careers, but for the next generation too. Mentoring has helped their careers or become part of a core tenant in their company and how they run their business. It’s a place to grow our community, and not just for those who look like us. We all talked about how we have grown from mentoring, not just as mentees but as mentors.
Click through for a dozen-and-a-half responses to the T-SQL Tuesday call.
Comments closedSteve Jones rustles up the herd:
I hosted this month’s T-SQL Tuesday party with my invitation asking about tracking permissions. I didn’t get my own post completed in time, but I’ll add it in the next week sometimes.
In any case, here’s a roundup of the posts I saw. If I missed any, ping me and I’ll add you.
Click through for the full list of respondents.
Comments closed