I was listening to a recent Brent Ozar Office hours and someone asked about using SQL Server Agent or Windows Task scheduler to schedule business logic jobs. Ozar mentioned that neither of those is satisfactory for enterprise workloads. He said that an application server ought to be used to handle scheduling business logic.
I’m just curious what the community thinks about SQL Server Agent vs using an app server.
I work at a company that uses many third party tools; we don’t have our own app. So, I don’t have developers on hand to create a scheduling tool. Many of the 3rd party apps we use don’t have a means to interface their scheduling utility with other services, so I typically use either SQL Server Agent or Windows Scheduler.
Just curious what you all are using to schedule powerShell jobs?
If that’s his opinion … … I’d say it depends pretty much on the requirements.
For our servers we use exclusively Windows Task Scheduler. We do not use SQL Server Agent except for SQL Server related jobs. For client related jobs we use our software deployment solution (SCCM).
I use any of the above, whatever we have available that will get the job done. There’s nothing wrong with using task scheduler, it’s literally designed to run scheduled jobs. Now if you get into dozens or hundreds of automation jobs, then perhaps a platform to manage those would be a better fit. As Olaf said, SQL agent jobs we use strictly for SQL related tasks. There is a powershell based product called Powershell Universal (previously called Universal Dashboard) that you can use to manage your jobs as well as create dashboards, APIs, and much more.
… I’d say it depends pretty much on the requirements.