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Editor
Review:
As
the editor for this book, I was honored to be
able to observe and recommend important areas for this definitive book
on Oracle Job Scheduling.
Oracle
job scheduling is
critical to any Oracle shop and the DBA must be able to create complete
DBA job streams for backups, redo log archiving and other database
activities that require interfacing with the external environment.
Dr.
Hall notes that with
Oracle10g there is no need to use UNIX/Linux crontab files any longer,
and he also notes some of the important shortcoming of scheduling
Oracle jobs in Linux, like the fact that dbms_scheduler will re-start a
missed job (when the database has been down) while a crontab will not.
Oracle
job scheduling has
always been super-complex, as we see within Oracle’s own
applications
products where a “concurrent manager” is used to
interface with the
dbms_job utility to schedule complex job streams.
It’s even more
confounding when vendor applications (such as the ever-popular SAP)
dispatch their own tasks independently from Oracle.
Dr.
Hall has an excellent
section on setting-up an Oracle scheduling environment and he show the
sophisticated features of Oracle scheduling including establishing job
classes and granting scheduler privileges.
But
this handy book goes far
beyond the basics, and Hall shared his real-world experience in
chapters dedicated to time-based job scheduling (i.e. run this job
every second Wednesday at 3:00 PM) and he shows working example that
will save the reader many hours of manual computations.
The
real meat of “Oracle Job
Scheduling” is where Dr. Hall explains the process of
chaining jobs
together with dbms_job and dbms_scheduler. Hall covers the
most
complicated aspects of Oracle job chaining including the conditional
execution of Oracle tasks, and working examples that show how to create
a robust jobstream with built-in error checking. He also
includes
details for job failure notification and shows how to alert the staff
using the utl_smtp protocol package.
But
Hall does not stop there.
He goes far beyond the Oracle documentation and shows working examples
of using the new Oracle job monitoring features and the reader can see
exactly how to use the Oracle job monitoring functions to monitor and
kill scheduled Oracle tasks.
Halls
opens-up his personal
experience in chapter 6, advanced scheduling Topics, and show
never-before seen techniques for setting scheduler object attributes
and the concept of “Instance Stickiness”.
Dr.
Hall has a long history of
explain complex Oracle concepts with clear, easy-to-understand
examples, and this book is no exception. Hall is provided an
online
code depot, replete with working examples of complex job streams, an
invaluable time-saver for the Oracle professional.
I
also like the price, as I’m
getting weary of shelling-out $50 for mediocre Oracle books and
it’s
refreshing to see that Rampant van offer a high-quality 288-page Oracle
book for only $9.95
My
copy of Oracle Job
Scheduling is already filling-up with dog-eared pages and post-it
notes, a sure sign that other Oracle professionals are going to find
this book to be an addition to their Oracle libraries that they will
actually use everyday.
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