Summary

Debugging jobs is no more difficult than debugging normal PL/SQL or scripts. Especially for the scripts that run as external jobs, don't forget the limitations of the environment definitions. Scripters used to scripting for cron know how to handle a "poor" environment. I hope this chapter gave enough tools to start debugging. The next chapter is about a real-life scenario. The things learned here should be very useful in real life. In this chapter, we saw:

• How the file privileges for external jobs should be:

  • In Unix systems using various releases of Oracle

  • In Windows systems

• What the externaljob.ora file looks like

• Normal Unix redirection cannot be used in jobs

• Windows scripts should be called using cmd.exe

• A list of Scheduler bugs with solutions or workarounds

• How to analyze a job chain using PL/SQL

• How to solve a stalled chain

• How to address a chain step

• How to prevent a stalled chain situation

• What to check in the database when unexpectedly a job does not run

• How to check the environment of...