Schedule a job on SQL Server for certain months - sql

Question

I'm looking to schedule a job on my SQL Server to run three times a day (8AM, 1PM, & 7PM) from January to June of every year and run the same job once a month for rest of the year.
I have tried to find an answer and so for I have not been successful. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!

Answer 1

(This has largely been addressed by the comments. I am converting their insight into an official answer.)
The built-in scheduler is only so sophisticated. It doesn't support the same schedule varying depending on the time of the year. However, it does allow multiple schedules, and you can perform your own scheduling logic in the SQL statement.
If you don't mind adjusting your job schedules each year, you can avoid having any custom scheduling logic in the SQL statement by setting up 4 separate schedules. You would set up the first 3 schedules as occurring Daily, every 1 day, occurring once at the relevant time of day (8 AM, 1 PM, or 7 PM). You would set an End date for those schedules of June 30th, 2014. You would then create another schedule which occurs monthly, on whatever day of the month you would like, every 1 month, at whatever time you would like. You would set the start date of that schedule to July 1st, 2014 and you would specify the end date as December 31st, 2014.
As stated, there is a big disadvantage to this method; you must change the schedule each year, as the current year is hard-coded into the schedules. (If desired, you can add the next year's schedules at any time, in advance-- even making several years-- and you can leave the old schedules until well after their end dates.) However, there are two advantages to the method. First, you don't have to write any scheduling logic in SQL, which is more likely to have bugs and would hide the scheduling reality from the casual observer. Second, the job only fires when it is supposed to, so your job history shows only those executions which matter. (If you are performing the scheduling logic in SQL, then you have the fire the job more frequently, letting it be squelched by the SQL scheduling logic but also cluttering up the job history.) A third, minor advantage is avoiding the very minor performance hit of all of the extra job executions and SQL scheduling logic evaluation.
If you are interested in using some scheduling logic inside the job's SQL statement, instead of making a larger number of specifically defined schedules, you could create a single schedule which fired every hour of every day. Then you would wrap the existing SQL statement in logic like the following:
DECLARE #TestDate datetime, #ExecuteSQL bit;
SELECT #TestDate = getdate(), #ExecuteSQL = 0;
-- Uncomment each of these lines (one at a time) to test the logic with various dates.
--SET #TestDate = '2014-07-02 8:00 AM';
--SET #TestDate = '2014-07-01 8:00 AM';
--SET #TestDate = '2014-07-01 9:00 AM';
--SET #TestDate = '2014-06-01 9:00 AM';
--SET #TestDate = '2014-06-02 1:00 PM';
--SET #TestDate = '2014-06-02 6:03 PM';
--SET #TestDate = '2014-06-02 7:03 PM';
SET #ExecuteSQL =
CASE
WHEN
-- it's between January and June and it's in the 8 AM, 1 PM, or 7 PM hours
(
DATEPART(m,#TestDate) BETWEEN 1 AND 6
AND
DATEPART(hh,#TestDate) IN (8,13,19)
)
OR
-- it's not between January and June, but it's the first of the month during the 8 AM hour
(
DATEPART(m,#TestDate) NOT BETWEEN 1 AND 6
AND
DATEPART(d,#TestDate) = 1
AND
DATEPART(hh,#TestDate) IN (8)
)
THEN
1
ELSE
0
END;
IF #ExecuteSQL <> 0
BEGIN
SELECT 'Do Fun Stuff Here';
END
ELSE
BEGIN
SELECT 'You would probably omit this ELSE, but it is maintained for demonstration purposes.';
END