Active and Passive Stages Required?

[rellison]

We are developing coding standards and have been told that we should always have an active stage in a job, even if it is only doing passive work like running select and upsert sql. I found little documentation in the Server guides, but not in the Enterprise ones (parallel job developer's guide and parallel job advanced developer's guide). Is there an requirements to include an active stage between two passive ones, and is there any requirement to always include an active stage in every job?
Thanks!

[ray.wurlod]

Welcome aboard. The concept of "active" and "passive" does not really work well with parallel jobs, since every operator potentially creates its own process - definitely true if operator combination is disabled - and all of them can be monitored. The usual reason for including an active stage in server jobs is so that the row counts can be monitored in Director using the meaningful name of the stage rather than the mysterious IDENT1.