T-SQL Tuesday: Your Fantasy SQL Feature

T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party for the SQL Server community. It is the brainchild of Adam Machanic (b|t) and this month’s edition is hosted by Kevin Chant (b|t) who has asked us to describe “Your Fantasy SQL Feature“. (This is also the first time I’ve made a blog post for T-SQL Tuesday.)

The Problem: As a junior DBA, part of my job involves checking job failures for 2-3 clients each day, which we have a script in-house for. Every once in a while, a job actually fails! So like any DBA who knows that you can go to the Job Activity Monitor under the SQL Agent to view details on job history, i do exactly that only to find it’s a job that ran an SSIS package and gave me this very informative error message:

That’s super helpful, thanks!

So now i have to:

  • Check the step properties
  • Look at the path for the SSIS package
  • Drill down into the integration services catalogue
  • clickity, clickity
  • Wait which folder was it in?
  • Go check the path again
  • clickity clickity
  • There’s 12 different packages with very similar names:

  • Resize the window or scroll over to see which one i care about
  • Finally, open the All Executions Report to get a very helpful error message:

Gee darnit, i’m out of coffee.

The Solution: Just put a button in the failure message/job history that does all that for you.  Or a hyperlink. Whatever.

Kevin Hill (b|t) has made a script that reads the SSISDB tables, but often takes a while to run with only the existing Microsoft indexes. Especially if you are keeping crazy amounts of history…like the MS default 365 days, on a busy system.

/*Please work*/,

SQLDork

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