Posts Tagged ‘bash’

Cron is too complicated for Oracle?

14th March 2009 by jt 4 Comments

A coworker and I had a spirited debate about how to run scheduled jobs in Oracle. Being the Oracle nerd that he is, his tool of choice is the Oracle job scheduler. He actually told me that running bash scripts off cron was ‘too complicated’. What!?!

Now, before I digress… I am very familiar with the Oracle job scheduler. I know its capabilities and some of its quirks. It is a nice tool. We are currently only leveraging a small part of its capabilities. But I’ve found it to have some odd quirks. Jobs don’t run for no apparent reason. When things go wrong it can be difficult to troubleshoot. Cron on the other hand is simple, flexible, and rock solid.

I’m an old unix guy. I’m certainly no guru on unix, but I do love the simplicity of the environment. Running bash scripts via cron is a powerful combination. Going back to when Oracle 7 was the latest and greatest, shell scripts were the way to do things in Oracle. And they still are for many people. After all, real DBAs don’t use OEM! Their tool of choice is putty!

You’ll find religious wars on unix vs linux , or on bash vs Korn. Let me give you a quick hint. They’re all pretty much the same. Following is a how-to on running a sqlplus script from a bash script in a linux environment.