Chapter 7. Debugging the Scheduler

As we all know, Murphy was an optimist. He said that if anything can possibly go wrong, it will. So, we can apply Murphy's Law to our Scheduler world and create a new law—"If anything can act differently from what is expected, and things probably will, start checking the system." There are a few files in the system that are critical for the working of the Scheduler, and their working is more critical for external jobs than for jobs that stay inside the database. Let's look at some of these critical files across platform versions—there have been lots of changes since the initial 10.2.0.1 release. Then, we will step through a few issues that might surprise even scripters who are familiar with the platform. Whenever an Oracle release is important, it will be listed separately.

Unix—all releases

Something that has not been made very clear in the Oracle Scheduler documentation is that redirection cannot be used in jobs (<, >, >>, |, &&, ||...