How to run a cygwin executable with Windows TaskScheduler without opening a terminal

From cygwin prompt, do:

$ wget http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py
$ python ez_setup.py

This will install easy_install on your cygwin.

Easy as py.

We have several "critical" systems where our vendors have chosen to depend on Windows Task Manager. The only problems I have ever seen would be; run times missed when the machine is off (it's not a job queue), tasks that fail simply because they were setup improperly, the executable or script itself failing every time task manager calls it and, the biggest problem of all has been, the user account set for the particular task getting locked out for any number of reasons.

To prevent the account lockout problem, I would recommend either creating a special account for the task or a little trick I have found, if the task does not need network access, you can schedule it to run as System with a blank password.

Finally, we monitor either automatically or manually all critical tasks. Just in case.

You mentioned this task was for a database. Is that database a Microsoft SQL Server? If so, you will want to look into using SQL Server Agent.