Job Scheduler eases the management of Adaptive Server by providing the ability to define and schedule database administration tasks. With Job Scheduler, jobs that normally require interaction from a database administrator can be scheduled to run unattended at the appropriate times, freeing the database administrator to attend to other issues.
Job Scheduler allows you to create and schedule jobs, and also share jobs and schedules. One database administrator can create a job and other database administrators can then schedule and run that job on another server. Jobs can be created from scratch, command line or GUI, loaded from a SQL batch file, or generated from a predefined template.
Job Scheduler captures the results and output of jobs, and records that information in log tables. Job Scheduler keeps a history of scheduled jobs. However, to keep a limit on the size of the history table, Job Scheduler is self-monitoring and removes outdated, unnecessary history records.
Job Scheduler is comprised of the following components:
An internal Adaptive Server task
An external process called the JS Agent
The sybmgmtdb database and stored procedures
The graphical user interface
Predefined templates from which the database administrator may create and schedule useful, time-saving jobs
The internal ASE task determines when scheduled jobs should run and creates a historical record of jobs that are run. It starts the JS Agent process and feeds JS Agent the necessary information to retrieve job information and run the job on the specified ASE.
The JS Agent retrieves the job information from Job Scheduler’s own database, called sybmgmtdb. Then it logs in to the target ASE and issues the job commands. When the job completes, JS Agent logs any result or output to the log tables in the sybmgmtdb database.
All the job, schedule, and scheduled job information, and data needed by the JS task for internal processing is stored in the sybmgmtdb database. Most access to data in the sybmgmtdb database is via stored procedures. The stored procedures make the data available to the GUI, the JS Agent and the command-line interface. Only the JS task accesses data directly from the sybmgmtdb database.
The GUI assists the user in creating and scheduling jobs, viewing job status and job history and in controlling jobs. The GUI also provides an administration feature to turn on and off the ASE internal task and therefore the ability of Job Scheduler to process and execute scheduled jobs.
Templates are an important tool in defining tasks for self-management of the database, such as database backups, reorganization rebuilds, modification of configuration parameters, and statistics updates and monitoring. They are implemented as batch Transact-SQL commands for which parameter values can be provided. Database administrators can use templates to generate jobs, which may then be scheduled to run at desired times.
For more information, see the Job Scheduler User’s Guide for Adaptive Server Enterprise.
