Survey guidelines about the execution time of a SQL Server agent job

  • Hi,

    a my customer asked me to provide him some guidelines to conduct a survey about the variability of the execution time of a SQL Server agento job.

    Shortly, I need to produce a methodology to verify this variability and to categorize the possible issues.

    Any suggests for me, please?

    Thanks

  • It kind of depends on what the job is doing how you can monitor it. If it's running DOS or PowerShell commands, the primary metrics are going to be the history of run times kept in the msdb database. If it's running T-SQL you can monitor it using extended events to understand how long each of the individual calls take.

    "The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
    - Theodore Roosevelt

    Author of:
    SQL Server Execution Plans
    SQL Server Query Performance Tuning

  • pmscorca (11/8/2013)


    a my customer asked me to provide him some guidelines to conduct a survey about the variability of the execution time of a SQL Server agento job.

    When you say "conduct a survey" if you mean asking others about the execution time of their jobs, I don't know how much data you're going to get that's of use because database jobs do so many different things. Performance is also dependent on many different factors. Just look at some of the performance tuning questions on this site.

    As an example, I might have one job that does database backups that can take hours and another to check a count in a table that takes less than a second. If both example jobs vary by 2 whole seconds, the variability of the first would be negligible and the second would be huge, yielding a result somewhere in the middle.

    If you have people self-report variance, you're going to get it measured differently (as Grant pointed out above) and then calculated differently based on the person doing to calculation. One may remove outliers and another may not.

    I'm not trying to discredit the idea of studying variability, but point out that there are many factors to consider. You should have standard methodologies for measuring and reporting.

  • As survey I want to intend the process to understand the possible issues that cause the variability about

    the execution time of the SQL Server Agent job.

    I need to define a troubleshooting approach for a DBA in order to face a such scenario.

    This approach is to document with some guidelines/procedural steps to follow.

    Thanks

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