Job sets

A job in the SCHEDULE database is essentially a self-contained processing unit. All the information needed to perform the processing is defined for each job in the control file. A group of jobs can be grouped into a set.

A set of jobs is just a collection of jobs that are connected to each other using either prerequisites or initiates. They can be in the same or different directories. They can be on the same or different nodes in a network.

Three bits of information are passed between members of a job set during execution to control and coordinate the processing. This allows for multiple invocations of the same job set processing different data without any interference between them. They are:

• Set id. - The set id. is just a number that is assigned to the first job that starts up the job set. This number can be manually specified or the system can automatically assign one.
  This value is available to the job through the environment variable SCHEDULE_SET_ID.
• Set parameter - The set parameter is just text data (up to 56 characters) that is passed into each job as it starts to execute. It is available to the job as the environment variable SCHEDULE_SET_PARAMETER. This value is established by the first job in the job set that is initiated. Later jobs can modify this value.
• Set tag - The set tag is also just text data (up to 32 characters) that is passed into each job as it starts to execute. It is available to the job as the environment variable SCHEDULE_SET_TAG. The only difference between the tag and the parameter is that the tag picks up its initial value from the control file. When a job set is first initiated and no tag value is explicitly provided then this value is picked up from the job tag field of the control data.