Blogs

August 27 2020 FA AG Coffee Break

Topic: jobsets.

Q1: How do you get your institution to grant jobset security? Sometimes you can start by asking for temporary access. Sometimes after you ask for security multiple times to setup and change jobsets they will give it more permanently. It is often best to start out in a development environment. It also usually works better if you show you have thought this through and explain the efficiencies and a risk assessment, then that will help your case. If there are concerns about monitoring, you can make it so that communications are sent to individuals if the process fails.

Q2: Jobsets are tied to an operid, so how do most institutions handle that? Some are set up under an institutional id, some under personal operid. Most schools have one-to-three institutional ids that they use to create jobsets, if more than one it is usually one for each functional area. That way the jobsets persist when a person leaves or is unavailable. It is best to use a document that is available to other individuals in the office in case something goes amiss and you are not available. Having this as part of an emergency plan has been used by some schools to get this access to an institutional id. Topic came up of also querying tables regarding processes. SCHDLITEM, SCHDLDEFN, PRCSDEFN. Also PMN_PRCSLIST.

Q3: Has anyone had an issue with jobsets being too big? One school is having trouble when they get more than 200 in one jobset. Other schools said they have larger ones and don’t have an issue. One school breaks jobsets into smaller chunks, so that they are similar to chapters of a book, and put those jobsets into one larger jobset. One school that is running over 600 jobs has them broken into smaller jobsets the same as the last school, and doesn’t believe that any single jobset actually has over 200. Often there is one jobset for nightly jobs, then there are different jobsets that run once or twice a week, or less frequently. Some schools don’t worry about setting up jobsets thematically and others do put them in thematic areas such as ISIR processing, budgets, packaging that have the needed dependencies between jobs. Scheduled queries or other jobs may not need dependencies. One school has smaller jobsets that are targeted towards different careers—which allows them to turn off a career and turn on a career individually, so that is one different strategy. Another strategy is to do those jobs by aid-year so that you can end one aid-year. One nice thing about jobsets is that you can reuse them.

Q4: What are some of the gotchas? One is when a jobset completes and then doesn’t run at the next scheduled time. Another school solved that, in the recurrence definition you have to schedule a recurrence when the new one is scheduled rather than when it completes, otherwise when an error is encountered then the next recurrence isn’t scheduled. This was covered in a presentation once, and one school said that with their setup this way they have never had theirs complete. You can also set a parameter on the job so that it will email you when the job is complete. Another gotcha, is the issue that you cannot have more than 299 recurrence definitions. Naming conventions are very helpful when recurrence definitions. On the recurrence page, if you have a job that runs frequently you will want to say don’t schedule any missed instances. One school said that the old recurrence date still comes in on the jobset, but they need to change that setting so that it doesn’t try to make up all of the dates between now and the first date. Also for processes such as 3Cs you can have it set not to create duplicates. Another gotcha, watch your cases on run-controls. Also when you hit the run-now button, it will run right then. Another “feature” is that jobsets don’t show up as completed in process scheduler the same.

Here are a couple of recent posts where schools have shared how they do their jobsets:

https://www.heug.org/p/fo/st/?post=417567#p417567

https://www.heug.org/p/fo/st/thread=146687