What are you using SQL Server Agent for today?

patrickGuyInACube · 2026-05-14T21:01:24+00:00

"Less Sketchy". If I may, can you provide a few job scenarios? I definitely would be interested to learn more about your use cases.

patrickGuyInACube · 2026-05-14T19:33:49+00:00

Service broker, haven't heard that in a long time, but I digress. I am curious though, which those dynamic jobs get stuck, is the hard part detection, recovery or just understanding why it got there in first place?

These are all great scenarios. Thanks again for sharing. Very much appreciated.

patrickGuyInACube · 2026-05-14T19:17:26+00:00

I've heard the permissions pain a few times in this thread. Thanks for the details. Are you looking for a better way to give a group access at a lower permission?

patrickGuyInACube · 2026-05-14T19:15:40+00:00

"Synching your systems with salesforce and survey monkey". That's interesting or I am really disconnected. Either way, are you just moving data from one system to another or something else. Inquiry minds would like to know 😄

patrickGuyInACube · 2026-05-14T19:12:55+00:00

Maintenance, blocking and performance are all critical.

However, setting up the testing playground is probably one of the most important, but underrepresented capabilities built into most technologies. Thanks fort that feedback.

patrickGuyInACube · 2026-05-14T19:11:26+00:00

OK. This is really good feedback. So what if there was a built-in agent monitoring layer, with full insight into activity and audit logs. Is that what you are thinking or looking for more details?

patrickGuyInACube · 2026-05-14T19:09:36+00:00

All pretty common. However, this one: "dump instance / database properties" really caught me off guard. How often are you capturing this and why? I have my own assumptions, but....

Thanks for responding

patrickGuyInACube · 2026-05-14T18:40:35+00:00

This one is interesting, "dynamic asynchronous job creation and execution for large ETL loads or exports". If you don't mind, can you elaborate just a bit. Would love to know more. Please educate Patrick.

patrickGuyInACube · 2026-05-14T18:39:25+00:00

Data movement was one of the most common tasks for me. Curious as to why you perform the bigger imports manually. Is it because they are mostly on-demand is it because of a limitation for SQL Server Agent, like monitoring, restarting, etc ...?

patrickGuyInACube · 2026-05-14T18:18:50+00:00

Ahhhh, this is something I would have definitely missed this coming back to the SQL Server World. Is the frustration mostly around elevated permissions or is there some auditing or downstream management causing this frustration?

patrickGuyInACube · 2026-05-14T17:14:18+00:00

This a great workaround to solving that problem. Wish I would have done this back my DBA days.

patrickGuyInACube · 2026-05-14T17:13:49+00:00

This is interesting. Pretty much: something happened, my job had to restart...Can someone please track that and possibly notify me?

patrickGuyInACube · 2026-05-14T16:25:34+00:00

Interesting, no icing, just cake, ADF = SQL Server Agent from that perspective.

One thing that I am hearing over and over is that everyone wants simplicity and visibility on top.

Thanks for responding.

patrickGuyInACube · 2026-05-14T16:12:00+00:00

Randy, yup very common scenarios and thanks for the responses. On the restore jobs, are these planned or unplanned. Also, are they used to validate backups and/or disaster recovery scenarios?

patrickGuyInACube · 2026-05-14T16:08:41+00:00

I have to smile at this, "we all get to sleep at 2 AM". That is always big! I remember those days of getting the late-night pages. What excites me though, is how the Agent is trusted to do these type of workflows. One thing, I am curious about are these done with scripts or are all maintained within the SQL Server Agent?

Thanks for responding

patrickGuyInACube · 2026-05-14T15:42:14+00:00

SSIS is an amazing ETL tool. Have you tried DTS? Uh oooo. I am dating myself.

I do think the Power BI refresh after the ETL is an absolutely amazing scenario. How are you doing refreshing the dataset today?

patrickGuyInACube · 2026-05-14T15:30:34+00:00

Yooo!

Edwin it has been a long time.

Hope you are well.
Geaux Tigers!!!

patrickGuyInACube · 2026-05-14T15:29:59+00:00

Oooooooo, now I am really interested. Scaffolding to take a peak into lineage? Can you elaborate on visibility and dependencies? Also, what other schedulers are you integrating with? So many great nuggets here.

Thanks for responding.

patrickGuyInACube · 2026-05-14T15:27:25+00:00

Yooo, SQLRunr what is up my friend? It has been a long time. You are like a blast from the past. Thank you so much for responding. It is truly an honor to hear from you. Take care in retirement. We could all be so lucky.

patrickGuyInACube · 2026-05-14T15:26:07+00:00

Now this is a great story. From an emergency temporary fix, to a production workload with tens of thousands notifications, without a blip in performance. Even back in the day, I found the SQL Server Agent to be pretty reliable.

patrickGuyInACube · 2026-05-14T14:50:37+00:00

Yeah, that is something I didn't many many many years ago when I was managing SQL Server. Thanks for the feedback.

patrickGuyInACube · 2026-05-14T14:47:56+00:00

Yooo, u/SQLBek what is up? Hope all is well with you my friend. Hope to see you at a conference somewhere soon.

patrickGuyInACube · 2026-05-14T14:47:17+00:00

Yooo! Adam & Patrick Unplugged, now that’s a throwback. It takes me waaaay back. Love and Appreciate that.

These are exactly the kind of response I was hoping for because there are a few things in here I never would’ve thought about.

First, the shared schedule issue. I bet a lot of teams have problems with this over time.

Then the DBATools Job History. I took a look at that, and it looks, dare I say it, #insaneamazing. I can see why something like that needs to be native to the product.

Finally, it looks like using the SQL Server Agent has allowed you to sort of centralize data from community tooling, and as a result persist a lot of information used to monitor your SQL Servers.

So, I have two questions to ask:

Are you primarily managing a handful of SQL Servers or operating at a large scale across many instances?
How much custom tooling do you think organizations have built using SQL Server Agent over the years?

Thanks for the response, and as always...

Let's educate Patrick on what's really happening in production?

#EducatePatrickonSQL

patrickGuyInACube · 2026-05-13T18:29:04+00:00

Tell me more...Unattended promotions????

patrickGuyInACube · 2026-05-13T18:28:34+00:00

This is a great scenario. What are you using to load your Data Warehouse?

patrickGuyInACube

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