Re: Need Scheduling Support for Your Databases?

carl <carlwkemp(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> Greetings All,
>
> I'm working on a specification for an Enterprise-class Open Source
> batch scheduler, and I really would like some expert commentary from
> experienced database people. Please have a look at:
>
> http://openjcs.sourceforge.net
>
> and the specification to date at:
>
> http://openjcs.sourceforge.net/doc/OpenJCS-arch.pdf
>
> Frankly, I'm of two minds about it. Half of me thinks it's massive
> overkill, and the other half thinks I must be missing something really
> important. Let me know what you think. I really do want your honest
> opinion, good, bad or indifferent.
>
> Also, it has been suggested that the specification might be useful if
> ported to Windows. For those of you who administer databases on both
> Windows and *nix, how useful would a tool like this be to you in your
> day-to-day operations? Do you think there is a big enough market to
> warrant cross-platform support?

It's not so much a DBMS issue as it is one for people running a lot of
heterogeneous applications (e.g. - DBMS bits, systems administration
bits, application bits, ...) across a bunch of hosts.

The best overview document I have seen about "enterprise job
scheduling" is the following one which is actually a Microsoft "white
paper." (I found it when Googling for "vms job scheduling.")

http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/7/2/272DB1B6-209A-4AEC-A231-105B35DC0271/Job_Sch_Final.doc

I don't know that I necessarily would want *all* the features that
they mention; they describe 3 'generations' of batch scheduling
features, and the items in the 3rd generation seem rather abstruse.
But plenty of the features in the first couple of "generation lists"
seem pretty useful. You may well find features in that document that
you'll want to add.

I'll note that you almost certainly want to use a full scale DBMS
(probably PostgreSQL!) to robustly store and help validate the rather
large amount of metadata that you will have around. That is the usual
way that "enterprise" job scheduler systems are implemented.

For instance, one feature you almost certainly want (that a proper
DBMS would help support) is the notion of supporting work calendars.
There are jobs to run every workday, based on some calendar. And
there may be multiple of those, as sets of holidays vary from place to
place. Indeed, this week contains the (different) national holidays
for Canada and the US. My employer has offices in both countries, so
that there is the potential to need to schedule things to evade some
*or both* sets of holidays. Monday and Wednesday are crummy days to
plan meetings (even ignoring the factor that a lot of staff are taking
extra time off).
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