Elastic Database Jobs

Today I’ll give an overview of Microsoft’s newly released (in preview) Elastic Database Jobs service. This is considered as a fully hosted Azure service, whereas the previous iteration was a custom hosted and managed version available on SQL DB and SQL DW within Azure.

It’s similar in capability to an on prem SQL Server Agent, but it can reach across multiple servers, subscriptions and regions. SQL Agent is limited to just the instance on the server for the database that you’re managing. This gives you a much wider range across all your different Azure services.

Other benefits and features:

• Significant capability added that can enable automation and execution of T-SQL jobs with PowerShell, REST API or T-SQL APIs against a group of databases.
• Can be used for a wide variety of maintenance tasks, such as rebuilding indexes, schema changes, collecting query results and performance monitoring. Think of it in terms of a developer who’s managing many databases across multiple subscriptions to support multiple lines of business or web applications with the same database schema and they want to make a change to it.
• The capability to maintain a larger number of databases with similar operations and it allows management for whatever databases you specify and that will ensure an optimum customer experience. You’ll also ensure maximum efficiency to maintain your databases without having to set up specific jobs on each of those servers, and to tap into them and make changes more efficiently during off hours and scale up/down when you need to. Plus, you can change that schema across all those databases with a simple interface.
• Schedule administrative tasks that otherwise would have to be manually done.
• Allows for some small schema changes, credential management, performance database, or even telemetry collection if you want insight into what people are doing on the databases.
• Build indexes off hours.
• Collect query results from multiple databases for central performance management, so you can collect this info into one place, then render info into a portal like Power BI.

Basically, it reduces management maintenance overhead with its ability to go across subscriptions. Normally, you’d have to have that job run on a specific server; but now within Azure, where you are running managed databases, you can run operations across those databases without having to set up separate jobs.

So, a cool feature – it’s now only in preview so it’s sure to grow and I’m excited about the direction. Whether it’s data or Azure, Pragmatic Works is doing it. If you have questions about the Elastic Database Jobs or anything Azure related, click the link below or contact us—we’d love to help.