Question

I am writing a Powershell script that does several things with a local SQL Server database.

One thing I am doing is running several SQL jobs, one after another. I run them like this:

 sqlcmd -S .\ -Q "EXECUTE msdb.dbo.sp_start_job @job_name = 'Rebuild Content Asset Relationship Data'"

Is there a way to get Powershell to delay running the next job until the first one is completed?

Thanks

Answer 1

To get access to SQL Agent Jobs from PowerShell you can use SMO:

EDIT: Thinking on efficiency if you are going to add this function to your script I would take the SMO loading out and just place it near the top of your script (prior to this function). It will probably slow your script down if every time you call the function it reloads the assembly.

Function Get-SQLJobStatus
{
    param ([string]$server, [string]$JobName)
    # Load SMO assembly, and if we're running SQL 2008 DLLs load the SMOExtended and SQLWMIManagement libraries
    [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName('Microsoft.SqlServer.SMO') | out-null

    # Create object to connect to SQL Instance
    $srv = New-Object "Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Server" $server

    # used to allow piping of more than one job name to function
    if($JobName)
    {
        foreach($j in $jobName)
        {
            $srv.JobServer.Jobs | where {$_.Name -match $JobName} | Select Name, CurrentRunStatus
        }
    }
    else #display all jobs for the instance
    {
        $srv.JobServer.Jobs | Select Name, CurrentRunStatus
} #end of Get-SQLJobStatus
}

Example of ways you could use this function:

#will display all jobs on the instance
Get-SQLJobStatus MyServer

#pipe in more than one job to get status
"myJob","myJob2" | foreach {Get-SQLJobStatus -Server MyServer -JobName $_}

#get status of one job
Get-SQLJobStatus -Server MyServer -JobName "MyJob"

You could utilize this function in your script and just repeatedly call it in a while loop or something until your job status shows “Idle”. At least in my head that is what I think could work 🙂