Cron or DBMS_JOB 3

[mmemon]

Hello,

I hope I am in the right forum for this question.
I have a question regarding my options. I am not an oracle dba but need I to get this resolved. We have a Solaris box here that needs to load data from a flat file to a table in Oracle on that machine. Now, I have been able to log into the unix box and run sqlldr command with the appopriate parameters control,data etc and load the data...
I would like to schedule this job to run in the middle of the night. I am working on setting up a cron job but haven't had success yet. Then I came across DBMS_JOB package. I am not familiar with this so my question is, can I accomplish this using DBMS_JOB? And if so what is the desired option CRON OR DBMS_JOB?

Thank You
Michele

 

[Scunningham99]

They both achieve the same. However personally i would use crontab to schedule unix scripts.

If you use dbms_job don't forget to alter the job_queue_processes parameter to a value greater than 1 else your jobs will not run.

Sy UK

 

[jee]

With DBMS_JOB, what you are scheduling to run are SQL and/or PL/SQL blocks. Also, the DBMS_JOB queue eats up licensed sessions - (number determined by dbms_job).

 

[sem]

You may wrap your call to loader by some .so library to call it from dbms_job as an external procedure, but I'd suggest to use cron. I suppose it to be more portable solution (use cron on Unix or at on Windows without need to compile anything).

Regards, Dima