Richard Waymire


Stairway to SQL Server Agent

Stairway to SQL Server Agent: Level 1: Setup and Overview

SQL Server Agent is a Microsoft Windows service that allows a DBA to automate administrative tasks. SQL Server Agent can run jobs, monitor SQL Server, and process alerts. The SQL Server Agent service must be running before any jobs scheduled to execute automatically can be run

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2020-02-19 (first published: )

21,683 reads

Stairway to SQL Server Agent

Stairway to SQL Server Agent - Level 10: Using proxy accounts with your Jobs

Examines the proxy subsystem, which allows job steps to impersonate another user account in order to perform tasks as a user other than the SQL Server Agent service account. This is especially useful when you want jobs to run as lower privileged users of your SQL Server.

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2019-03-26 (first published: )

12,773 reads

Stairway to SQL Server Agent

Stairway to SQL Server Agent - Level 12: Using MSX/TSX to scale out Job Management

Examines the scale-out capabilities of SQL Server Agent, using the MSX/TSX subsystem. This capability allows you to run jobs on multiple systems and consolidate the job results/history onto a single server.

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2019-03-26 (first published: )

10,243 reads

Stairway to SQL Server Agent

Stairway to SQL Server Agent - Level 2: Job Steps and Subsystems

SQL Server Agent jobs are made up of a series of one or more Job Steps. A job step is assigned to a specific job subsystem, which identifies the kind of work the job step is going to perform. Each job step runs in a separate security context, although each job also has an owner that determines who can modify the job.

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2019-03-26 (first published: )

10,010 reads

Stairway to SQL Server Agent

Stairway to SQL Server Agent - Level 5: Understanding SQL Agent Error Logs

How to interpret and configure the SQL Server Agent error logs. Critical information about SQL Server Agent is sent to this error log, so knowing how to find it and how to interpret information in the log will save you valuable troubleshooting time.

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2019-03-26 (first published: )

8,470 reads

Stairway to SQL Server Agent

Stairway to SQL Server Agent - Level 7: Working with the SQL Server Agent Job Activity Monitor

The Job Activity Monitor is the system administration tool to run jobs, view job history, and enable/disable jobs. This article will also review some of the stored procedures run by the Job Activity Monitor that you can also use directly to do your own custom job monitoring.

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2019-03-26 (first published: )

6,224 reads

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Question of the Day

Fun with JSON I

I have some data in a table:

CREATE TABLE #test_data
(
    id INT PRIMARY KEY,
    name VARCHAR(100),
    birth_date DATE
);

-- Step 2: Insert rows  
INSERT INTO #test_data
VALUES
(1, 'Olivia', '2025-01-05'),
(2, 'Emma', '2025-03-02'),
(3, 'Liam', '2025-11-15'),
(4, 'Noah', '2025-12-22');
If I run this query, how many rows are returned?
SELECT *
FROM OPENJSON(
     (
         SELECT t.* FROM #test_data AS t FOR JSON PATH
     )
             ) t;

See possible answers