Automation basics in Toad for SQL Server (Part 2)

Hello, my name is Robert Pound, and I'm a Quest technologist. SQL Recall automation code libraries. These are just a few of the Toad features that enhance productivity. In this video, we will cover the basics of automation. It is assumed for this video that you have the SQL Server Management Studio plug-in installed, you have a database connection established in either SQL Server Management Studio or in Toad, and you have a SQL statement that you want to automate. In part one, we opened an automation tab, created a simple script. Now we will test and schedule that script. If you have not already done so, please open up your automation script. We will start by simply choosing run in the toolbar to execute the script. In the log window, if there are any errors, they would show up here, but we can see that it's run successfully because we have the done message, and we have executed the SQL, and exported the data into the CSV file. We can click on this link to actually open the file, and we can see our comma separated value file with the data. We have some null fields and that's because something's missing in this file. And I've exported more rows than I expected, so let me go ahead and move over to the demo file real quick. And yep, I have forgotten the where clause, so let me go ahead and add that right now. And we're going to go ahead and set this to filter for black, and I will save. And let's go ahead and switch back to the automation and run it again. And since the file is linked, everything should run correctly. And yes, we've only imported 93 rows now. And that looks more like what I was after. Now that we are satisfied that our script is running properly, we can schedule it by coming to the top and to schedule automation script. A new tab will be open for the job manager, and we are presented with a details window for the actual automation script itself. We can add in some comments about what the job actually contains, so that way, three months from now, we still understand what it is the script is supposed to be doing. And we can set the password. If we don't, it will be prompted. Once we click OK, I'm going to go ahead and enter it in and confirm it now. And moving to the actual schedule, we wanted to schedule this weekly. You have several options, but again, for the purposes of this demo, we're going to go ahead and schedule it for Wednesday, and 2:35 looks like a good time to me. And in the settings tab, you have some more refinement as far as running it during idle time, power management features, etc. But I'm going to go ahead and click OK. And now in the job manager, we can see the scheduled automation for this given server. And you can see the server name's here, and a little bit of status about the schedule itself, the last successful run, run date, etc. And then in calendar mode, we can switch between days, work weeks, months, etc. And you can hover over any of the automation tasks and get some details about what that script is as well. And double-clicking on them will bring the detail pane back up. We can also switch over to agent jobs running on a given server, so as you can see there are several connections here. I'm going to connect to the same server. So you can see there are some backup jobs running or scheduled to run on the server as well, and you can switch back to list mode to see the list of agent jobs as well. And to get to this tab itself, from Toad if you're working in Toad, you can come to tools, administer, and job manager. You can also get to it from the Management Studio itself. So, from the Management Studio, if I right-click, and choose Toad manage, it is also here, job manager. I hope this video helped you get started with automation. For more information on this product, visit www.quest.com/products/toad-for-sql-server. Or you can check out the community-driven innovation going on at www.toadworld.com. Thank you, and have a great day.