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SQL Agent’s schema is older than me. It handles dates, times, and durations like it’s 1980 by using integers instead of date/time data types. My buddy Aaron Bertrand talks more about Dating Responsibly so that you can have a good datetime with your own …
Continue readingQuestion We have a job which imports data daily from a remote SQL Server every night, I'll call it Import-Job. Most of the time this job runs through in about 15 minutes and everything is fine but due to a rather unstable VPN connection sometimes the job …
Continue readingQuestion I wrote a script that reads job schedules from msdb.dbo.sysschedules and runs sp_update_schedule to change the active_start_time for a given subset of jobs. In each case, sp_update_schedule fails with the message "The specified @schedule_id('xxx') …
Continue readingDropping tempdb files like they're hot I recently came across a server where tempdb was breaking all the rules. Data files were all different sizes. I want all data files to be the same size so that proportional fill uses them evenly. There were 10 tempdb …
Continue readingWhat's xp_sqlagent_enum_jobs? If you landed on this post, I'm guessing you know the answer to this, so I'll be quick. `xp_sqlagent_enum_jobs` is an undocumented (and thus, unsupported) extended procedure that gives information on whether a job is currently …
Continue readingWARNING: Silent truncation ahead Have you ever tried to enter a really long description on a SQL Agent job? Maybe you were trying to put some sort of warning to people who might be trying to edit the job, or triage info for when the job fails. (Ok, so this …
Continue readingAvailability Groups (AGs) are all the rage these days. Every SQL Saturday, every local Users Group, bloggers and DBAs everywhere are all talking about how cool they are. There's a lot of talk about how AGs provide a compelling alternative to Failover Cluster …
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