Nadrek (9/17/2012)
I'd have to rate the particular example selected as "Implement all the requirements to get system table updates to act as expected."In this case, the failure wasn't in updating system tables and perhaps strange, dangerous, or difficult to deal with side effects, it was merely in failing to restart the agent service after the msdb tables were updated.
@Nadrek: The system stored procedure does a lot of things besides simply "telling" the SQL Agent service that a configuration change has been made. The most important thing being - updating the meta-data. True, one may reinvent the wheel and do the same things externally, but, it doesn't really add value for money.
Besides, in most hosted or large-scale enterprise environments, restarting the SQL Server may not be a feasible option because all interfaces and other systems which also have their databases hosted on the same instance would go down.
Thanks & Regards,
Nakul Vachhrajani.
http://nakulvachhrajani.com
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