Amazon RDS for SQL Server supports SQL Server Agent

Amazon RDS makes it easy to provision and run production databases, and customers running RDS for SQL Server will be pleased to hear they can now use SQL Server Agent to schedule and execute administrative tasks on their databases.

SQL Server Agent is a tool designed to take some of the manual heavy lifting of tuning and maintaining database services off database administrators’ shoulders. For example, you could schedule regular index builds and data integrity checks as part of your regular maintenance program.

You can also schedule and run T-SQL script jobs using the tool, which is useful for a number of uses:

• Merging or transforming data as part of regular reporting runs
• Database clean ups, purging older records or converting logical deletions to physical ones
• Performance tuning

To get started, simply connect your SQL Server Management Studio to your Amazon RDS for SQL Server database. Click on ‘New Job’, and follow the guided instructions. Easy as that.

SQL Server Agent joins the Database Tuning Advisor as an invaluable tool in any SQL Server DBAs kit. You can learn more about viewing the logs of the SQL Server Agent and managing jobs in the ‘Common DBA tasks’ section of the Amazon RDS documentation.

Scheduling options in SQL Server Agent.

Let us know what jobs you’re schedulding with SQL Server Agent, or jump in and spin up your production stack on Amazon EC2 with provisioned IOPS or AWS Elastic Beanstalk.

We’re hiring!

If you’re passionate about bringing tools such as SQL Server and SQL Server Agent to customers across the world, the Amazon RDS team has open positions for software developers, test engineers and product managers. Get in touch on rds-jobs@amazon.com.

~ Matt