22-25 April 2026

Poor folks' SQL Server job monitoring with R

2022

TL; DR

A mini project combining T-SQL and R to develop a dashboard-like overview of your SQL agent jobs' and the trends of their durations.

Session Details

Of course SQL Server (Management or Azure Data Studio) offers you a list view of the agent job history. But wouldn't it be nice to have a graphical overview of job durations and how they develop? This session is for DBAs and R newbies alike: In one hour we'll develop a dashboard-like overview of your agent jobs' and their durations with the R language. We'll work our way from finding the right system tables to use, generating one graph per job with the help of R, to adding that little trend line to every one of them. After creating it in RStudio, we'll eventually adapt our script to run in SSMS/ADS just as fine. Once finished, no additional tools are needed, no additional €€ spent.

3 things you'll get out of this session