SQL Agent on Andy M Mallon - AM²

Consuming SQL Agent dates & durations

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 16:17:43 -0500

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 database.

Job to stop other job at specific time

Fri, 13 Aug 2021 11:25:34 -0400

Question

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 takes a lot more time.

sp_update_schedule says @schedule_id does not exist

Tue, 06 Oct 2020 12:53:39 -0400

Question

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') does not exist". (MessageID 14262, Severity 16)

Fixing tempdb: Growing, shrinking, and removing data files

Tue, 21 Apr 2020 09:00:37 -0400

Dropping 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 files, with 8 files on a dedicated disk, and 2 on a slower disk shared with other data files. And free space was sky high, so the extra files aren't needed anymore! (They were probably added to fix a short-term emergency, and never cleaned up.)
The log file was tiny, and didn't have room to grow. For a 500GB tempdb, the log file was only 4GB!

Three fixes

There are three problems I’ve got to fix. I need to (1) remove those two extra files, (2) grow the tempdb log file, and (3) even out the size of the data files (and shrink them a little to make room for the larger log file. We’re going to tackle these in the reverse order than I listed them–partially out of necessity, and partially because it’s going to be easier.

xp_sqlagent_enum_jobs alternative

Thu, 18 Feb 2016 10:00:21 -0500

What'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 running, when it last ran, when it runs next, etc.

The supported alternative is to use sp_help_job (which calls xp_sqlagent_enum_jobs), but sp_help_job is difficult to use in automation because trying to do INSERT #temp EXEC sp_help_job; will result in an error due to nested INSERT...EXEC statements (Error 8164: “An INSERT EXEC statement cannot be nested.”). As a result, people often turn to calling the unsupported xp directly.

Really Long Descriptions on SQL Agent Jobs

Fri, 25 Sep 2015 14:38:00 -0400

WARNING: 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 sort of documentation should be on your wiki, not in a job description… but stuff happens)

Using SQL Agent MSX for Availability Groups

Tue, 07 Jul 2015 00:22:00 -0400

Availability 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 Instances (FCIs). The cost (nothing is free, of course) is that with AGs, you have non-contained objects that you need to manually keep in sync between nodes.

A lot has been said and blogged about syncing non-contained objects. Here. Here. Here. Here. And plenty of other places.

SQL Agent on Andy M Mallon - AM²

Consuming SQL Agent dates & durations

Job to stop other job at specific time

Question

sp_update_schedule says @schedule_id does not exist

Question

Fixing tempdb: Growing, shrinking, and removing data files

Three fixes

xp_sqlagent_enum_jobs alternative

What's xp_sqlagent_enum_jobs?

Really Long Descriptions on SQL Agent Jobs

WARNING: Silent truncation ahead

Using SQL Agent MSX for Availability Groups

What's `xp_sqlagent_enum_jobs`?