Question

When I try to create a Schedule the minimum amount of time I can choose from is 1 minute, is there a way to reduce this to seconds?

Answer 1

This article here SQL Server Job Scheduling says you can – just not directly from the UI (the seconds aren’t exposed as a valid choice).

See in about the middle of the page:

Schedules for frequent executing jobs

SQL server jobs can have high running
frequency with interval less than 1
minute. But this capability is not
exposed to SQL agent GUI, only “Hours”
and “Minutes” are supported.

This can be achieved by calling the
stored procedure
msdb.dbo.sp_add_jobschedule or
msdb.dbo.sp_update_jobschedule.

The stored procedures have a parameter
@freq_subday_type, it has three values
according to BOL:

Value Description (unit)
0x1 At the specified time.
0x4 Minutes.
0x8 Hours.

For the same column in
msdb..sysjobschedules table, it has
four values, which includes 0x2 for
seconds.

Though 0x2 is not documented for the
two stored procedures, it can accept
the value and create the schedule
correctly, e.g. this script will
create a job runs every 30 seconds
everyday.