another way would be to look for agent startup in eventlog. here is a way to parse the log with powershell.
get-eventlog -logname system -source "service control...

You can also checkout dbatools powershell module.  It includes a command, start-sqlmigration,  that will migrate everything for you. Or run individual command to migrate objects piecemeal...

1. Is it possible just to update the SQL Server without updating MS Dynamics to 2016 version.

2. I know SQL Server 2016 EE comes with clustering capabilities, but what happens...

Unless I misunderstood you, I would...

My example does make the assumption that server collation is not Latin1_general_BIN

you can check server collation with select SERVERPROPERTY('Collation') If this returns Latin1_general_BIN then change the collation...

One way to do it(not pretty) would be to suppress the column headers with the @query_result_header then add a rows with headers as part of your query. you will have...

I do have to point out that if using the SQL Server license that comes with SCOM, that SQL Server instance cannot be used for anything else.

By AlwaysOn, do you mean availability groups? Alwayson includes both failover clusters and availability groups.

Since system center comes with SQL Server Standard license and that is the license you...

John1.5.nlt (2/4/2016)

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So is this the best way to manage this with minimal downtime? I mean this in relation to creating a transaction, truncating and loading the data and then closing...

you could use msdb.dbo.sp_help_job @execution_status = 1 to identify job step. you would have to do some parsing of the output.

my suggestion would be to checkout the msdb.dbo.sysjobhistory table....

the reason your job continues to the next step after sending an email is because the step completes successfully (ie proc runs, error caught, email sent). the try-catch shelters the...

database snapshots would not solve your problem as you would run into the same blocking issue when creating new snapshot.

the way I deal with this exact situation is...

IMO, the best bet would be to create the 2014 cluster on new hardware and then migrate database(s),logins, jobs,etc to new instance. your databases will get upgraded when restoring them...

A virtual account is basically a local manged service account. IMO, a better option than "local system" if SQL Server does not need access to any network resources.

these days I use managed service accounts instead of regular domain accounts for sql server services.

As for local system account, it has a lot more privileges than are needed...