sp_stop_job reports Success, but the jobs are still running

We have some jobs that run via the scheduler. We noticed today that some are still running from the weekend, and we need to kill them.

We have used sp_stop_job and it reports that the job has been stopped sucessfully, but looking at the Job Activity Monitor that status is still Executing: 1 (Subplan_1). I am using various queries to get the jobs that are currently running and the jobs still appear.

SELECT [sjv].[name], [sjv].[description], [sja].[run_requested_date], [sja].[last_executed_step_id]
FROM [msdb].[dbo].[sysjobs_view] sjv
JOIN [msdb].[dbo].[sysjobactivity] sja
ON [sjv].[job_id] = [sja].[job_id]
WHERE [sja].[run_requested_date] is not null
AND [sja].[stop_execution_date] is NULL

How is this possible? Is it just sending an ABORT command or similar? And can I really kill the jobs immediately?

I'm rather new to this side of SQL.

You should keep in mind that aborting a job does not always mean the job is aborted as expected. It could be that the transactions needed to be rolled back and this may also take a while depending on the amount of data and the performance.

StackExchange Database Administrators Q#141712, answer score: 3