SQL Server Agent

This is another useful piece of code (well, I find it handy anyway) which I wrote to help populate a dashboard.

I’ve come across a few issues recently with regard to the ownership of SQL Server Agent jobs which caused some scheduled tasks to fail and therefore critical maintenance tasks weren’t carried out. Therefore I thought I would share my thoughts on Job Ownership.

I’ve yet to come across a SQL Server which actually makes use of some of the free alerts which SQL Server will hand you if you let it. These are alerts which are already logged inside of SQL Server and are just waiting for you to set up some notifications around them.

This is actually an extension to my previous No Job History Showing post in which I pointed out how easy it is to end up without any job history in your SQL Server Agent and therefore not be able to diagnose problems.

This is a common complaint I hear whenever I see a new server for the first time… I see a failed job, go to open the Job History, and am told “oh, there’s never anything in there. Why doesn’t SQL ever hold enough?”. Well, the answer is that it simply hasn’t been told to.

This is a common “problem” that I see within SQL Server and was asked about just yesterday, but 99% of the times, and with this particular instance as well, it’s actually not a problem at all just a missing setting within the SQL Server Agent.