I’ve been quiet about the Standalone SQL Agent for a while now. I haven’t forgotten about the project, in fact I’ve been busily working on it in what little free time I have. I’ve been working on phase 2 of the project which is adding in the UI to handle job management. Needless to say, I forgot how much I hate building User Interfaces. I much prefer building windows services which no one sees.
I’m trying to keep the UI as simple as possible while providing all the functionality that the native job management via SSMS provides; even if not all that functionality is supported by the Standalone SQL Agent at this time.
Even though you can’t download a client installer, or the source (since I haven’t checked and in yet) I figured that I’d post a few screenshots to show where I’m at and get some feedback on it.
The first screenshot here is the job list which comes up after you select the SQL Server instance you want to connect to (yes you can connect to a remote instance so that you can manage SQL Express machines remotely). It shows the jobs, there current state as queried from the SQL Server, if they are enabled and the Next Run Time. Currently I’m not getting the Last Run Time back from the SQL Server so that needs to be corrected.
The next screenshot is the job step info page. This should look very similar to what you see in SQL Server Management Studio or SQL Server Enterprise Manager.
It has the job name, owner, category, and the date information.
The third screenshot (below) are the job steps for the selected job. This screen should also look very similar to what is shown in SQL Server Management Studio and SQL Server Enterprise Manager.
I hope that this looks useful as I’m still plugging away at the UI (I hate making UIs).
I’ve also added in a command line application which will remove the three (so far) stored procedures which are placed within the msdb database. The service puts these in place when the Agent is started, and I need a way to remove them easily during install, so I put them in a separate executable so that they could be easily removed if needed.
Denny
4 Responses
Images have been fixed. Sorry about that. Laptop crashed during graphics upload.
This is great! We could really use this UI. Keep us posted!
Looks pretty good. When is the ‘expected’ release date?
Also, how do you manage jobs on Express? Would these be “Scheduled Tasks”?
So far I don’t have an expected release date. My laptop died (don’t ask) so that’s making it tough. Once get it replaced I’ll be able to start working on it again.
The UI that I’m showing above will be how the jobs are managed. It’s very similar in look and feel to the job editor in SSMS. The backend that is used is the same as the normal SQL Server Agent as far as the tables and procedures so jobs can be added normally via script and still work correctly.