As you saw in previous chapters you can order jobs in the online facility. However, using this method, you must first enter the online facility. Then you must order the jobs, either individually or a table at a time. This method is not bad for an occasional job order, but it certainly is not suitable for ordering a large number or jobs, especially if they are from different tables.
In this chapter, you saw that you can order a large number of jobs using a single run of CTMJOB. And you can keep the list of jobs you specified to CTMJOB for reuse. This eliminates the disadvantages of using online job ordering on regular daily basis.
For daily processing, employing User Daily jobs provides an additional advantage—the Date Control record. The Date Control record has many advantages, including the following facts:
It can be used in conjunction with the RETRO parameter, described in the parameters chapter of the Control-M for z/OS User Guide, to enable the site to catch up with missed work days—for example, if the system is down for several days.
It enables Enhanced Daily Checkpointing, which is useful in case of system crash.
However, even the User Daily job must be ordered. There are several ways this can be done:
You can order the User Daily job using the Online facility. But this requires going into the Control-M Online facility—still a manual intervention.
You can order the User Daily job using CTMJOB.
You can use any the other job ordering methods available, some of which will be described below. But this, too, involves manual intervention.
Finally, you can order User Dailies using the New Day procedure. The New Day procedure is defined and maintained by the Control-M administrator, and is run once each day as part of New Day processing. When User Dailies are defined to the New Day procedure, they are automatically ordered each day that their basic scheduling criteria are satisfied. Most sites use a combination of User Daily jobs and the New Day procedure to completely automate daily job scheduling.
Because the New Day procedure is defined by the Control-M administrator, and is discussed in detail in the INCONTROL for z/OS Administrator Guide, it is not discussed in this guide.
Before moving on to a discussion of alternative methods of job ordering, you should note the following points about User Daily jobs:
Control-M provides two sample User Daily job scheduling definitions in member MAINDAY in the SCHEDULE library:
DAILYSYS is a sample User Daily for scheduling system jobs
DAILYPRD is a sample User Daily for scheduling production jobs.
You can define as many User Daily jobs as you want, with each ordering only those jobs that you want it to order. This leaves you great flexibility in organizing your User Daily jobs by whatever system is useful. For example, you can organize User Dailies according to table, application or group, department, basic and runtime criteria of the jobs being ordered, or any other useful criteria or combination or criteria.
You can define the scheduling criteria of the User Daily job in any way you wish. For example, if a certain set of jobs is to be processed at the end of the work day, there is no need for them to sit in the Active Jobs file all day. Instead, you can ensure that they are ordered only in the evening or at night, by appropriately defining the TIME FROM criteria of the User Daily that orders those jobs.
If you want, you can define a User Daily to run several maintenance procedures that you would like run in succession.
Although the New Day procedure is ordered only once each day, at start of New Day, you can order User Daily jobs whenever you wish, and as often as you wish. Of course, you must ensure that this does not produce unwanted results. If you do not want multiple orders of the same job, you should not run the User Daily more than once.
You can locate your User Daily jobs as you wish. For example, if all the User Daily jobs are placed in a single table, then by ordering that table you order all User Daily jobs that it contains.
