Imagine the following: You have a couple or more SQL Servers with some sort of High Availability solution between them (AlwaysOn Availability Groups, Database Mirroring, etc.). You also have a bunch of scheduled jobs which you need to be run on the Primary server.
But wait…. How would you make these jobs run only on the Primary server? After all, if they try to run on the Secondary, they would fail (whether because the database is inaccessible or because it’s read-only). Additionally, you would need to consider the possibility of a failover where the Primary and Secondary servers would switch roles.
This means that you would have to, first, create these jobs on both servers, and implement some sort of mechanism that would detect, for each job, whether the instance it’s being executed at is currently the Primary.
There are a few ways to go about doing this.
[For the sake of this article, let’s ignore the fact that most people don’t even think about it, and leave all of their important jobs on the Primary server only, while ignoring the risks of what would happen when their Primary server crashes and fails over to the Secondary]
