A Cleaner Way to Detect the State of a SQL Server Agent Job In SQL Server 2005

Tim — Sat, 23 May 2009 13:18:38 +0000

I have always felt that the traditional approach to getting Agent Job status by creating a table and populating it with output from xp_sqlagent_enum_jobs was incredibly crude. So I poked around a bit and came up with a solution using a Table Valued Function that queries sysjobactivity to determine the status of a given job. The reason I use a Table Valued Function is because we have a few tables that contain a list of jobs that need to be started at certain points in a given process (and they may or may not already be running) - with the TVF, you can simply CROSS APPLY the function and bob's your uncle.

Example
Say you needed to run a chunk of code only if a set of jobs in a given table aren't running:

	IF  NOT EXISTS (SELECT 1
		FROM AppJobDependency a WITH(NOLOCK)
		CROSS APPLY [dbo].[Utility_GetAgentJobStatus_F01](a.[JobName]) c
		WHERE [JobStatus] = 1)
	BEGIN
		-- Code goes here
	END

Table Valued Function

/*************************************************************************************
***
*** Procedure:  		[Utility_GetAgentJobStatus_F01]
*** Purpose:		    Get the current status of given agent job
***				
***			
*** Author:		      tl
*** Date Created:	  2009-03-03
*** 
*** Revision History
*** Date		Author			Description
*** 2009-03-03	tl				Created
*************************************************************************************/
CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[Utility_GetAgentJobStatus_F01] 
(
	@JobName varchar(255)
)
RETURNS @JobStatus TABLE ([JobStatus] BIT)
AS
BEGIN
 
	WITH JobActivity AS
	(
	SELECT 
		 a.start_execution_date
		,a.stop_execution_date
		,ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY session_id DESC) AS [RowNumber]
	FROM
		msdb.dbo.sysjobactivity a WITH(NOLOCK)
		INNER JOIN msdb.dbo.sysjobs b WITH(NOLOCK)
		   ON 
			a.[job_id] = b.[job_id]
			AND b.[name] = @JobName
	)
	INSERT INTO @JobStatus
	SELECT COUNT(1)
	FROM JobActivity
	WHERE
		start_execution_date IS NOT NULL
		AND stop_execution_date IS NULL
		AND RowNumber = 1
 
	RETURN
END

SQL Server Analysis Services Command (XMLA) Agent Job Step Reports Success On Command Failure

Tim — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 20:35:11 +0000

I ran in to this the other day, did some googling, and really did not like what I saw for workarounds. In SQL Server 2005, when an XMLA job step fails (returns an Exception node in the XML response), the job step still reports success (because it's defining success as "did I get a response") - this has been fixed in SQL Server 2008. Common workarounds are using ascmd.exe or SSIS to handle the XMLA commands (ish - both of those solutions add a lot of complexity for a simple problem). So, I came up with a workaround that checks the text of the previous job step for the substring "

After each XMLA command step, insert a T-SQL step to verify that the XMLA command step succeeded:

DECLARE @JobName VARCHAR(64)
 
SET @JobName = ‘Name OF Job This Step Belongs TO’
 
DECLARE @Message VARCHAR(1024)
 
SELECT TOP 1 @Message = CAST([message] AS VARCHAR(1024))
FROM msdb.dbo.sysjobhistory a
INNER JOIN msdb.dbo.sysjobs b
ON a.job_id = b.job_id AND b.[NAME] = @JobName
ORDER BY run_date DESC, run_time DESC, step_id DESC
 
IF @Message LIKE ‘%<Exception %’
RAISERROR (@Message, 17, 1)

UPDATE (2009-04-03): Added , step_id DESC to ORDER BY clause - when the XMLA job fails instantly (say you tried to process a nonexistant partition), run_time doesn't have enough granularity to sort properly.

Once your done, your job steps will look something like this:

tim laqua dot com » sql server 2005

A Cleaner Way to Detect the State of a SQL Server Agent Job In SQL Server 2005

SQL Server Analysis Services Command (XMLA) Agent Job Step Reports Success On Command Failure