Job executions are usually associated with one target, such as a patch job on a particular database. These are called single-target jobs because each execution has only one target. However, job executions are not always a one-to-one mapping to a target. Some executions have multiple targets, such as comparing hosts. These jobs are called single-execution jobs, since there is only one execution for all the targets. When a job is run against multiple targets, it runs in one or many executions depending on whether it is a single-execution or single-target job. A few jobs have no target. These jobs are called targetless jobs and run in one execution.

When you submit a job to many targets, it would be tedious to examine the status of each execution of the job against each target. For example, suppose you run a backup job against several databases. A typical question would be: Were all the backup jobs successful, and if not, which jobs failed? If this backup job runs every week, you would want to know which backups were successful and those that failed each week.