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

Chapter 8. The Scheduler in Real Life

In this chapter, we will see how we can incorporate Oracle Scheduler into real-life scenarios and solve various problems in a variety of ways. The scenarios themselves are not really important, but they are real enough to show the power of Oracle Scheduler.

One of the first things to consider when thinking about what to schedule in the Scheduler database is the statistics collection. This is the collection of the optimizer statistics in the database. The challenge here is to have the statistics run whenever they are needed, without slowing down the business application that is supposed to run on the database.

Another thing to consider is running the backups. For the backups, we can use the remote external job agent. Here, we can use the Scheduler Agent and see how to use the Scheduler events to react on the results of a job. This can be seen as an advanced form of chaining where we do not build a chain as an object definition, but as a chain defined by...