SQL Server Agent is a Microsoft Windows service that executes scheduled administrative tasks, which are called jobs in SQL Server.
T-SQL includes a large collection of stored procedures that deal with SQL Server Agent jobs.
Here, we’ll use some of them to create and schedule a SQL Server Agent job.
You can also create SQL Server Agent jobs via the GUI (in SSMS) if you prefer.
Continue readingWhen you first create a SQL Server Agent job, you might want to do a quick test to see if it’s going to actually run without any issues.
This is quite straightforward when using the SSMS GUI, but how do you do it in T-SQL?
Answer: The sp_start_job stored procedure.
SQL Server Agent is a Microsoft Windows service that executes scheduled administrative tasks, which are called jobs in SQL Server.
You can create SQL Server Agent jobs with T-SQL or with the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) GUI.
Here’s how to do it using the SSMS GUI.
Continue readingIf you’ve created a SQL Server Agent job, and you’re now trying to test it to see if it will run properly, you may encounter an ugly error message that reads, among other things, “SQLServerAgent is not currently running so it cannot be notified of this action”.
Fortunately, this is easy to fix.
Continue readingIf you were trying to create a SQL Server Agent job for the first time, but a message popped up that confused you, read on.
Continue readingIf you’re creating a SQL Server Agent job for the first time, you might find that you need to enable the SQL Server Agent extended stored procedures (SQL Server Agent XPs) first.
When you use the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) tool to start the SQL Server Agent service, these extended stored procedures are enabled automatically.
When you use T-SQL, you can enable the SQL Server Agent XPs with the sp_configure stored procedure.
SQL Server error Msg 206, Level 16 is a common error to get when inserting data into a table.
It happens when you’re trying to insert data into a column that is incompatible with the data type you’re trying to insert.
This could happen if you accidentally try to insert data into the wrong column (or even the wrong table). But it could also happen if you incorrectly assume that SQL Server will convert the data for you.
To fix this issue, make sure you’re inserting the correct data type.
Continue readingIf you’re familiar with creating partitioned tables in SQL Server, you might be used to creating a separate filegroup for each partition. This has its benefits, and may very well be the method you would choose in most scenarios.
However, you also have the option of mapping multiple partitions to a single filegroup.
In this article I share two examples of mapping multiple partitions to a single filegroup.
If you have a partitioned table or index in SQL Server, and you want to determine which partition a given value would be mapped to, you can do this nice and quickly with the $PARTITION system function.
All you need to know is the name of the partition function (and of course, the value you’re interested in).
Continue readingThere are four transaction modes in SQL Server. One of these is implicit mode.
In SQL Server, an implicit transaction is when a new transaction is implicitly started when the prior transaction completes, but each transaction is explicitly completed with a COMMIT or ROLLBACK statement.
This is not to be confused with autocommit mode, where the transaction is started and ended implicitly.
Continue reading