How do you configure a job step to automatically retry if it fails, rather than immediately marking the entire job as failed?

Intermediate

Answer

You set the retry attempts and retry interval properties on a specific job step, telling SQL Server Agent to automatically attempt that step again a defined number of times, waiting a specified number of minutes between attempts, before finally marking it as failed if all retry attempts are unsuccessful.

EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_update_jobstep
  @job_name = 'DataSync',
  @step_id = 1,
  @retry_attempts = 3,
  @retry_interval = 5;

Real-world example A data synchronization job automatically retries up to three times with a five minute delay between attempts if it initially fails due to a temporary network issue, often succeeding on a retry without requiring any manual intervention.

Common follow-ups: What kinds of failures are good candidates for automatic retry versus immediate alerting?;How do you view how many times a step actually retried during a specific run?

Error Handling with TRY CATCH;Linked Servers

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