job class, windows, windows group

Job Classes

A job class is a way of grouping jobs into larger entities, thus enabling you to prioritize access to the job slaves among those job classes. This means that you can, for example, make sure a CEO's request will begin before a routine job. In addition to using job classes for resource allocation, you can also use them for setting job characteristics or behavior that must be the same for all the jobs in the class.

When defining job classes, you should try to classify jobs by functionality. Consider dividing jobs into groups that access similar data, such as marketing, production, sales, finance, and human resources.

Within a job class, you can:

· Specify attributes at the class level. For example, you can specify the same policy for purging log entries of all payroll jobs.

· Specify the order in which a job is started. You can assign priority values of 1-5 to individual jobs so that jobs with a higher relative priority start before jobs with a lower priority. If two jobs have the same assigned value, the first job enqueued takes precedence.

· Ensure that a job is started only if there are no runnable jobs with a higher priority in that class. In the case of resource contention, this ensures that you do not have a less important job preventing the timely completion of a more important one.

Some of the restrictions to keep in mind are:

· A job must be part of exactly one class. When a job is created, you must specify which class the job is part of. If you do not specify which class the job is part of, it automatically becomes part of the default class.

· Dropping a class while there are still jobs in that class results in an error. You can force a class to be dropped even if there are still jobs that are members of that class, but all jobs referring to that class will automatically be disabled. In this case, the class for these jobs will be reset to the default system class. Jobs belonging to the dropped class that are already running will continue to run under class settings determined at the start of the job.

Windows

A window enables you to change resource allocation during a time period such as time of day or time of the sales year. You do this so you can control which groups of users have what level of priority. For example, you could control access to a printer so product managers have a lower priority than executives. A window is represented by an interval of time with a well-defined beginning and end, such as "from 12am-6am".

You can assign a priority with each window. If windows overlap, the window with the highest priority is chosen over other windows with lower priorities.

Window Groups

You can group jobs for ease of use. An example would be to combine weekends, times from 12AM to 7AM, and holidays into something called "downtime". This downtime window group offers you more control over when jobs are run. In this case, perhaps the data warehousing department would only want their queries run during this time when they might be assigned a high percentage of available resources.

A window group is only to combine windows and is only for jobs that use a window as a schedule.