Practical Maintenance Plans in SQL Server: Automation for the DBA

© Bradley Beard 2016

Bradley Beard, Practical Maintenance Plans in SQL Server, 10.1007/978-1-4842-1895-2_4

4. Executing SQL Server Agent Jobs

Bradley Beard¹ 

(1)Palm Bay, Florida, USA

Ah, good old SQL Server Agent. What would we do without you? Well, that’s easy; nothing. Not in this book, anyway. The purpose of SQL Server Agent is to execute scheduled administrative tasks, so without it, we couldn’t do anything automatically and we would have to do all of this manually. Now, don’t get me wrong; all of this can be done in T-SQL… but why would you want to do that, when you can have trusty SQL Server Agent do it’s one and only job?

Now, before we go any further, let me stop right here and state the obvious. You cannot use this task to run a job that ...