Re: dbms_jobs versus cron

Hanne Iren Midttun wrote:

> Hi,
> from another thread (Oracle stored procedures vs Running from a flat .sql
> file), I saw that it was stated that dbms_jobs was better then cron.
>
> I have only runned dbms_jobs on 7.3.4 AIX (I think it was the right
> version, it's been a while), and on that version cron was far better.
> (ie the dbms_jobs did not run at all and so on)
> I was really sorry to migrate to cron because moving a database from one
> machine to another was really a lot of work - I allways forgot a script, a
> directory, some rights on the filesystem and so on.
>
> Now I am running 8.1.7.4, AIX and thinking of migrating to 9i. does
> somebody have any experience with dbms_jobs on this versions?
>
> regards Hanne

I've used it in environments as small as a university class and as large at AT&T Wireless. It works, from my experience, flawlessly.

The advantages are numerous including the one mentioned by Jim which is portability. Write once and execute anywhere. Try moving a cron job to Windows and you'll quickly discover it is a non-starter.

Other things I like are the ability to schedule multiple jobs, groups of jobs, ob dependencies, the most robust error handling, and perhaps most importantly the ability to keep the UNIX SysAdmin out of the loop.

Not that I have anything against SA's. Some of my best SA's have been friends. But SA's don't see their mission as being reading, running statistics upon. and writing reports related to database errors that don't involve the O/S. Also, with errors reported by SA's the error ends up being logged in two places: Once in the database and once in the O/S and someone has to manually stitch them together to get at the 'root' of the problem.

Another important reason for DBMS_JOB is that it keeps Oracle passwords where they belong ... tightly controlled and changeable.

Daniel Morgan Received on Wed Jan 08 2003 - 15:02:51 CST