pgAgent Jobs

pgAgent runs ‘jobs’, each of which consists of pgAgent Steps and pgAgent Schedules. To configure jobs on your server, browse to the server on which the pgAgent database objects were created. A Jobs node will be displayed, under which individual jobs are shown. New jobs may be created, and existing jobs modified in the same way as any other object in pgAdmin.

The properties tab in the main pgAdmin window will display the details of the selected job, and the Statistics tab will show the details of each run of the job.

Job themselves are very simple - the complexity is in the steps and schedules. When configuring a job, we specify the job name, whether or not it is enabled, a job class or category, and optionally the hostname of a specific machine running pgAgent, if this job should only run on that specific server. If left empty (which is normally the case), any server may run the job. This is not normally needed for SQL-only jobs, however any jobs with batch/shell steps may need to be targetted to a specific server. A comment may also be included.

Note: It is not always obvious what value to specify for the Host Agent in order to target a job step to a specific machine. With pgAgent running on the required machines and connected to the scheduler database, the following query may be run to view the hostnames as reported by each agent:

SELECT jagstation FROM pgagent.pga_jobagent

Use the hostname exactly as reported by the query in the Host Agent field.