Recently there was an interesting question from one of the forum users ,the question was something like ‘How long the data collector jobs are scheduled to run when I configure Data Collection in SQL Server 2008?My job is running since 3000 minutes’

To understand this behaviour we need to look into what Data Collector is all about.Data collector was first introduced in SQL Server 2008 and it used to collect various data and it can be stored in a database called Management Database Warehouse(MDW).Data collection is made and stored in the database to analyze for different time periods.Data collector currently provides 3 reports,which are Server Activity,Query Stats,Disk Usage.

To understand more about Data Collector you can always refer http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb677248.aspx

The data collector jobs will run continuously as long as the SQL Server Agent is running[This is the default setting] and it is scheduled to start when the Agent starts.This jobs will collect the data continuously and the upload job runs as per schedule(By default every 15 minutes).

[Data collector is available only in SQL Server 2008 and above]