I ran into an interesting issue this morning after upgrading to SQL 2012 that I did not know existed. I had a job fail for various reasons and was alerted like normal of the failure. Upon going to the SQL agent to view the history of the job I found nothing in the history – which I thought was odd. I decided to hop over to the sysjobshistory table and sure enough my history was all there as expected. So what is the correlation? Why was my job history in the table but not being shown in the view history on the agent?

I  noticed a message on the bottom left where the status and progress sections are in the properties section of the Log File Viewer for the job – the message read “The given key was not present in the dictionary”. Upon doing some research it so happens that a known bug was discovered with special characters in job names. In my job, for whatever reason, it had a “,” in the name of it. In digging some more I could find only the term “Special Characters” was being thrown about, but I could not find a specific listing of what special characters…was it 1,2,3 or all?

Once I removed the “,” from the name and re-ran the job upon completion the history itself was re-populated in the agent with no issues.

I decided even further to test this out; I put the comma back in the job and then scripted the job out to see if it would error, to my surprise it did not error out. I would have expected it to error on script creation due to the comma; I guess that the bug runs a bit deeper than I initially thought.

Microsoft has responded that this will be resolved in the next SP release of 2012; I figured if anyone else runs across this that the information might help.