The SQL Server Agent

The SQL Server Agent is your hands off, automated work horse. The SQL Server Agent can handle all of your recurring processing, notify operators, provide hands off monitoring of your server, and manage replication. It can also be integrated with SQL Mail to provide a very powerful notification subsystem as well as self contained applications such as e-mail notification of orders and simple report server functions.

There are three functional areas to the SQL Agent:

1. Operators - These are the people/computers/pagers that receive notifications of job status and alert threshholds being exceeded.
2. Jobs - These are your recurring processes and possibly some error handling or management processes as well.
3. Alerts - One of the most overlooked features. Alerts monitor your system and notify your or run processes when certain environmental threshholds are exceeded.

To get the full benefit of the SQL Server Agent, you should have SQL Mail configured and running. If you don't, stop now and refer to chapter xxx for setting up and configuring SQL Mail

SQL Server Agent Configuration

As with every feature you will use in SQL Server 7.0, the SQL Server Agent requires a small amount of configuration to perform at peak efficiency. All of the configuration options can be accessed by opening the Management item under your server within Enterprise Manager. Right click on the SQL Server Agent and select Properties from the pop up menu.

Note: For the screen shots below, I am using a Windows 98 machine so some of the options may appear differently on your system.

General properties.

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