Database background

Relational database management systems (RDBMS) can be very powerful. With a little code, we can use the RDBMS as a filesystem, mail server, HTTP server, and now also as a full-blown job Scheduler that can compete very well with other commercial job Schedulers. The advantage that Oracle gives us is in terms of price, flexibility, and phenomenal power. The scheduling capabilities are all a part of the normal Oracle license for the RDBMS, whereas others have a serious price tag and often require a database for the repository to store the metadata of the jobs.

Scheduling events in the database

Since Oracle added the procedural option to the database, they also included some scheduling power provided by dbms_jobs. Although a bit restricted, it was used extensively. However, no one would even think about using this as an Enterprise-level Scheduler tool. This changed when Oracle introduced 10gR2. In this release, Oracle could not only start jobs that ran outside the database, but they also added the job chain.

In 11g, Oracle also added the option to run jobs on remote systems where no database is running. Now it's time to rethink what the database actually is. In the early days, a database was just a bunch of code that could hold data in tables. Today, the Oracle RDBMS can do that—and that too well—along with many more things. In fact, the Oracle RDBMS can perform so many tasks so amazingly, that it's surprising that we still call it just a database. We could easily turn it into a personal assistant.

Oracle Scheduler 11g can: