Control-M...

Learned something new today.

At my current client I have the opportunity to work with a scheduler by the name of Control-M, a product from bmcsoftware.  If you’ve never “developed” using a dedicated scheduling tool, then you were like me as of yesterday.  And I’m not talking about scheduling things using SQL Server Agent; that’s baby wipe compared to these software packages.  Totally heavy-duty, bro!  ESP and Cron are others that come to mind.  If you haven’t used one directly, you have probably worked around them from time to time, and requested jobs from some obscure and non-visible group to set up and fire off DTS and SSIS packages, .bat and .cmd files, and .exe and .vbs files.  Anyway, thought I’d just say that it’s pretty slick!  

Essentially, each .bat, .cmd, or whatever you choose, is wrapped around a ‘job’, and several jobs are created that look sort of like a workflow.  The relationships created within each job refer to a previous or next job and are connected automatically when you specify this relationship.  Each job has a table that stores the metadata about the job, and they are ‘uploaded’ to a server. From there, you can run the jobs on demand or set them up to run based on a schedule.  I think it’s super cool and am enjoying building the jobs…something different to do I guess.

Lee

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Stealing more work from the mainframers all of the time. Dig it!