Editorials, Encryption/Data Security

Scheduling Tools

Scheduling Tools
I wrote about scheduling in Azure yesterday as a place where some of the tools we have become accustom are not available. My primary tool of choice for scheduling has been SQL Server Agent, being primarily a DBA for decades.

One reader, Shannon, reminds us that there are a lot of capabilities built into Azure allowing for tasks to be created. It turns out Azure is not as anemic as I implied yesterday.

Bob Writes:
I have been using a legacy version of the Opalis Automation Scheduler, mainly for data warehouse jobs. Opalis was a Canadian company that was bought out by Microsoft a couple of years ago. It is now a part of Microsoft’s System Center offerings. It is very feature rich and I would recommend it to anyone who needs one tool to kick of all IT related jobs.

Shannon Writes:
I use the Windows Task Scheduler for scheduling tasks in Windows Azure.

Through a startup task on a single worker role instance, I run a batch file that starts the task scheduler service. It then also creates the jobs and their schedules.

I’ve been doing this for months and it’s very reliable.

Thanks everybody for your comments. Be sure to write in if you have other scheduling tools you find useful in a Windows environment. Drop me an Email at btaylor@sswug.org.

Cheers,

Ben

$$SWYNK$$

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