"I suppose you could say that everyone has an El Guapo." Lucky Day, The Three Amigos
As the title of my blog post says, I've got an El Guapo, a nemesis, an antagonist. It's a mental monkey trap. I cannot seem to figure out how the 'Limit size of job history log' setting for the SQL Server Agent would be useful to me in its current incarnation, which hasn't changed since at least SQL Server 2000. In this History setting found in the SQL Server Agent properties, you can set the maximum job history log size in rows, which defaults to 1000, and you can also set the maximum job history rows per job, which defaults to 100.
We use SQL Agent extensively...very extensively. On some of our servers we have hundreds of jobs that handle everything from database and server maintenance to data loads. While these jobs all follow a basic form, they have a variable number of steps depending on what the job is intended to do. Our largest job has upwards of 100 steps by itself. Additionally, these jobs run with a certain frequency, be it daily, weekly, monthly, or whatever other frequency we can concoct.
And so, while we find the 'Automatically remove agent history' option very useful, I cannot seem to come up with a scenario where setting job history limits in terms of rows would be useful other than as a last protection from a SQL Agent job run amok.
Any ideas?