Book Image

Mastering Oracle Scheduler in Oracle 11g Databases

By : Ronald Rood
Book Image

Mastering Oracle Scheduler in Oracle 11g Databases

By: Ronald Rood

Overview of this book

Scheduler (DBMS_SCHEDULER) is included in Oracle Database and is a tool for the automation, management, and control of jobs. It enables users to schedule jobs running inside the database such as PL/SQL procedures or PL/SQL blocks, as well as jobs running outside the database like shell scripts. Scheduler ensures that jobs are run on time, automates business processes, and optimizes the use of available resources. You just need to specify a fixed date and time and Scheduler will do the rest. What if you don't know the precise time to execute your job? Nothing to worry about, you can specify an event upon which you want your job to be done and Scheduler will execute your job at the appropriate time. Although scheduling sounds quite easy, it requires programming skills and knowledge to set up such a powerful, intelligent scheduler for your project. This book is your practical guide to DBMS_SCHEDULER for setting up platform-independent schedules that automate the execution of time-based or event-based job processes. It will show you how to automate business processes, and help you manage and monitor those jobs efficiently and effectively. It explains how Scheduler can be used to achieve the tasks you need to make happen in the real world. With a little understanding of how the Scheduler can be used and what kind of control it gives, you will be able to recognize the real power that many known enterprise-class schedulers ñ with serious price tags ñ cannot compete with. You will see how running a specific program can be made dependent on the successful running of certain other programs, and how to separate various tasks using the built-in security mechanisms. You will learn to manage resources to balance the load on your system, and gain increased database performance.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Mastering Oracle Scheduler in Oracle 11g Databases
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

Chains and steps


As mentioned earlier, a chain consists of multiple steps that are logically connected together. We cannot say anything about the behavior of these steps in the job chain. In order to know when these steps are going to be executed, we have to know what rules are applied to them. All steps have a name. We are going to reference these names of steps in our rules, which we will define later. Now, let's return to the backup example and list the steps there:

  1. 1. SHUTDOWN: Take the database offline in a clean way.

  2. 2. COPYFILES: Copy the database files to a remote location.

  3. 3. STARTUP: Start up the database for a normal operation.

Without rules, nothing much will happen. The Scheduler will be looking for a step to start, but will be unable to find it. As soon as the Scheduler finds itself in a situation where it is given a chain and it cannot determine what to do next, the job gets a special job status—CHAIN_STALLED. This status means that the Scheduler does not know how to handle the...