Purpose of the Article
This article is devised to give a way of running the jobs on demand irrespective of scheduled process. This is very useful in such a case when there is no fixed time for data processing. Incoming data can come anytime and at the same time, system should run the job for data processing. To achieve this, many times we schedule our jobs to run at every half an hour/ 10 mins/ 15 mins etc which in turn wastage of system resources. We can control unnecessary execution of job by using Seed file that tells to Job whether it has to start execution or not.
What is Seed File?
Seed file can be any type of blank file (.txt,csv,.xls) that can be used as input parameter to start the execution of any process. For quintessence-
IF Seed file is available
BEGIN
START THE PROCESS
END
ELSE IF Seed file is not available
BEGIN
BYPASS THE PROCESS
END
How to control the execution of jobs using Seed file?
1. To control the execution of jobs, we need an additional step that should be the first step of the job which should check whether seed file is available in the source folder or not.
2. If seed file is available then job should go to next step and execute as expected and at last step, Job should delete the seed file.
3. If seed file is not available in the source folder then Job should by pass the steps and should quit with reporting success.
Steps to control the execution of Jobs using seed file:
1. Create first step of the job for checking whether file is exists or not. For checking file existence and Deletion, we are using XP_FILEEXIST and XP_CMDSHELL extended stored procedures. Below is the code which checks whether file is exists or not.
If file exists, we are simply doing select 1
If file does not exists then we are raising the error with message- ‘Seed file is not available’
DECLARE @Flag INT
DECLARE @FilePath VARCHAR(500)
DECLARE @DelFilePath NVARCHAR(500)
SELECT @FilePath = '\\IND-SQL-01\Processing\Start_Processing.txt'
EXEC MASTER..XP_FILEEXIST @FilePath, @Flag OUT
IF @Flag = 1
BEGIN
SELECT 1
END
ELSE
BEGIN
RAISERROR('Seed File is not available',16,1)
END
GO
Fig showing the first step of the job for checking file existence
2. Create one more step that should be the last step of the job that should delete the seed file if exists to clean the source folder for next execution. Below is the code for deleting the file:
DECLARE @Flag INT
DECLARE @FilePath VARCHAR(500)
DECLARE @DelFilePath NVARCHAR(500)
SELECT @FilePath = '\\IND-SQL-01\Processing\Start_Processing.txt'
SELECT @DelFilePath = 'DEL' + SPACE(1) + @FilePath
EXEC MASTER..XP_FILEEXIST @FilePath, @Flag OUT
IF @Flag = 1
BEGIN
EXEC MASTER..XP_CMDSHELL @DelFilePath
END
Fig showing the last step of the Job for cleaning the seed file
3. Go to Step first then Edit then Advance. Set the below setting
a. On Success : Go to Next Step
b. On Failure: Go to Last Step.
4. Job Steps:
In this way, we can bypass the processing steps if seed file is not available and we can save unnecessary utilization of system resources required for execution of the job.
Conclusion
By using the above mentioned steps, we can implement on demand job execution functionality.
