quote:
This is rediculous. Why do I have to be absolutely dependant on an e-mail server's 24/7 availiability in order to get email from SQL Server? At any time, exchange can be down. If it is, SQL Mail quits working correctly. This is completely unacceptable.
Jeremy, you don't need the sleep. Just monitor 24/7 from your desktop. Take breaks only to raid the snack machine and shower.
But seriously, it's bad enough where we've gone to a job scheduler + Perl + SMTP that Jeremy had a huge hand in implementing. And we've learned our lesson with respect to SQLMail and applied it to other environments. We had a US$1M software package that did notifications using a client that run Outlook to fire off emails in the same way SQLMail does. Based on the lack of dependendability we've seen in SQLMail (even with Exchange is up... which is most of the time), we recommended engineering our own notification mechanism using the job scheduler + Perl + SMTP. The current solution with SQL Server 7.0 and 2000 isn't very workable.
K. Brian Kelley
http://www.truthsolutions.com/
Author: Start to Finish Guide to SQL Server Performance Monitoring
K. Brian Kelley
@kbriankelley