How can I determine the status of a job?

This is what I'm using to get the running jobs (principally so I can kill the ones which have probably hung):

SELECT
    job.Name, job.job_ID
    ,job.Originating_Server
    ,activity.run_requested_Date
    ,datediff(minute, activity.run_requested_Date, getdate()) AS Elapsed
FROM
    msdb.dbo.sysjobs_view job 
        INNER JOIN msdb.dbo.sysjobactivity activity
        ON (job.job_id = activity.job_id)
WHERE
    run_Requested_date is not null 
    AND stop_execution_date is null
    AND job.name like 'Your Job Prefix%'

As Tim said, the MSDN / BOL documentation is reasonably good on the contents of the sysjobsX tables. Just remember they are tables in MSDB.

You could try using the system stored procedure sp_help_job. This returns information on the job, its steps, schedules and servers. For example

EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_help_job @Job_name = 'Your Job Name'

SQL Books Online should contain lots of information about the records it returns.

For returning information on multiple jobs, you could try querying the following system tables which hold the various bits of information on the job

• msdb.dbo.SysJobs
• msdb.dbo.SysJobSteps
• msdb.dbo.SysJobSchedules
• msdb.dbo.SysJobServers
• msdb.dbo.SysJobHistory

Their names are fairly self-explanatory (apart from SysJobServers which hold information on when the job last run and the outcome).

Again, information on the fields can be found at MSDN. For example, check out the page for SysJobs

I would like to point out that none of the T-SQL on this page will work precisely because none of them join to the syssessions table to get only the current session and therefore could include false positives.

See this for reference: What does it mean to have jobs with a null stop date?

You can also validate this by analyzing the sp_help_jobactivity procedure in msdb.

I realize that this is an old message on SO, but I found this message only partially helpful because of the problem.

SELECT
    job.name, 
    job.job_id, 
    job.originating_server, 
    activity.run_requested_date, 
    DATEDIFF( SECOND, activity.run_requested_date, GETDATE() ) as Elapsed
FROM 
    msdb.dbo.sysjobs_view job
JOIN
    msdb.dbo.sysjobactivity activity
ON 
    job.job_id = activity.job_id
JOIN
    msdb.dbo.syssessions sess
ON
    sess.session_id = activity.session_id
JOIN
(
    SELECT
        MAX( agent_start_date ) AS max_agent_start_date
    FROM
        msdb.dbo.syssessions
) sess_max
ON
    sess.agent_start_date = sess_max.max_agent_start_date
WHERE 
    run_requested_date IS NOT NULL AND stop_execution_date IS NULL