In Part 1 of this series, I introduced you to the basic components and some information you need to know before using the scheduler. Today’s post will cover using the API to create some basic objects. I’ll show how to use SQL Developer to simplify some of these tasks.

Today’s post will cover creating programs and jobs.

Programs

As I said in my last scheduler post: it all starts with the program. A program is a PL/SQL procedure (can be packaged but not a function), PL/SQL block or external OS program.

You do not need to define a program if you don’t want to.

DBMS_SCHEDULER is Oracle’s full featured scheduling solution that runs inside the database. Think of it as a complete replacement for DBMS_JOB (which I do still use occasionally but am using less and less over time). DBMS_SCHEDULER has a lot of benefits over DBMS_JOB – ability to stop a job, ability to reuse code, ability to reuse schedules, ability to chain jobs into a job streams, etc.

This post is the first of a series of posts that I will be doing on DBMS_SCHEDULER. Actually I am doing a lot of Streams work again and it was kind of a toss up as to which tool I’d blog about first.