why does view history on sql agent jobs sometimes show more than 1 line for a job step?

Question

Hi we run 2014 enterprise. I am wondering why view history on sql agent jobs in ssms sometimes shows 2 or 3 lines for the same job step.

Answer 1

Hi @db042190 ,

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A!
The default message that is saved in the job history is 1024 characters. In most cases this may be enough, but if you have a long running process you may need to store more than 1024 characters.

Best regards,
Seeya

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Answer 2

thx seeya. why would the duration impact the size of the message?

erland, i'm going back to look at these but as i recall there was nothing useful or out of the ordinary in the additional entries.

Answer 3

Are you sure you are looking at the same job name?

Answer 4

hi all. the job step that has 3 entries has the following messages...and was a long running step relatively speaking at close to 2hrs...

Executed as user: xxxx. The step succeeded.
started...finished....elapsed...
Microsoft (R) SQL Server Execute Package Utility Version 12.0.6433.1 for 64-bit Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Started: 6:14:49 AM DTExec: The package execution returned DTSER_SUCCESS (0).

a step that has 2 entries from that day and ran close to 4 minutes had the following...

Executed as user: xxxx. The step succeeded.
Microsoft (R) SQL Server Execute Package Utility Version 12.0.6433.1 for 64-bit Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Started: 8:28:02 AM DTExec: The package execution returned DTSER_SUCCESS (0). Started: 8:28:02 AM Finished: 8:31:51 AM Elapsed: 229.094 seconds

a step that has one entry and ran for 18 seconds looked like this

Executed as user: xxxx. Microsoft (R) SQL Server Execute Package Utility Version 12.0.6433.1 for 64-bit Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Started: 8:31:53 AM DTExec: The package execution returned DTSER_SUCCESS (0). Started: 8:31:53 AM Finished: 8:32:08 AM Elapsed: 15.609 seconds. The package executed successfully. The step succeeded.

Answer 5

Can you run this query to see whether you can get more information about your job steps?
select
j.name ,
s.step_id ,
s.step_name ,
message,
* From msdb.dbo.sysjobs j
INNER JOIN msdb.dbo.sysjobsteps s
ON j.job_id = s.job_id
INNER JOIN msdb.dbo.sysjobhistory h
ON s.job_id = h.job_id
AND s.step_id = h.step_id
AND h.step_id <> 0
--where j.name = 'yourjobname'