The way my team currently schedules jobs is through the SQL Server Job Agent. Many of these jobs have dependencies on other internal servers which in turn have their own SQL Server Jobs that need to be run to keep their data up to date.
This has created dependencies in the start time and length of each of our SQL Server Jobs. Job A might depend on Job B finishing, so we schedule Job B a certain estimated time in advance to Job A. All of this process is very subjective and not scalable, as we add more jobs and servers which create more dependencies.
I would love to get out of the business of subjectively scheduling these jobs and hoping that the dominos fall in the right order. I am wondering what the accepted practices for scheduling SQL Server jobs are. Do people use SSIS to chain jobs together? Is there tooling already built into the SQL Server Job Agent to handle this?
What is the accepted way to handle the scheduling of multiple SQL Server jobs with dependencies on each other?
I have used Control-M before to schedule multiple inter-dependent jobs in different environment. Control-M generally works by using batch files (from what I remember) to execute SSIS packages.
We had a complicated environment hosting 2 data warehouses side by side (1 International and 1 US Local). There were jobs that were dependent on other jobs and those jobs on others and so on, but by using Control-M we could easily decide on the dependency (It has a really nice and intuitive GUI). Other tool that comes to my mind is Tidal Scheduler.
There is no set standard for job scheduling, but I think its safe to say that job schedules depend entirely on what an organization needs. For example Finance jobs might be dependent on Sales and Sales on Inventory and so on. But the point is, if you need to have job inter dependency, using a third party software such as Control-M is a safe bet. It can control jobs on different environments and give you real sense of the company wide job control.