Unicenter CA-Scheduler Job Management for VSE User Guide

6.1 Commonly Asked Questions
6.1.1.3 Should I Use Datetables or Calendars?
Datetables and calendars are two different methods used to select schedules
and jobs for a specific day. Datetables provide significantly more flexibility
than calendars and should be used if at all possible. They are a bit more
complicated to understand, but entail less maintenance than calendars when
going from year to year. Datetables also allow multiple accounting periods as
well as different holidays.
One area where you will want to use Calendars is when the schedule has to
run according to a set of dates that follows no pattern. Define these individual
days once in a calendar. Then when any schedule runs on those dates, you
give it that calendar name for selection.
For most of your application needs, however, use datetables. A detailed
discussion on this matter appears in the chapter "Criteria Language."
6.1.1.4 When Should I Define a New Datetable Versus a New Cycle in an
Existing Datetable?
Keep in mind that a cycle can be an accounting, production, or sales period.
You can have up to twenty cycles defined with any one datetable, and any
number of datetables. The datetable prefixed by the letter A is your default
production datetable. The other prefixes are variations upon that datetable.
Any time you want to schedule a job based on a combination of two or more
cycles, you must use the datetable prefix; you cannot use different datetable
names.
6.1.2 Maintaining the Database
Commonly asked questions concerning maintaining the database follow.
6.1.2.1 How Should I Organize My Schedules?
A schedule should consist of a group of logically related jobs. This group of
jobs usually belongs to one application, but could also be run at the same
frequency. For example, you could define a Payroll schedule containing all the
payroll jobs and its selection criteria. If certain jobs in the schedule do not run
every time the schedule is selected, define the selection criteria for the
exceptional jobs. Or the daily Accounts Receivable jobs could be contained in
one schedule and the weekly Accounts Receivable jobs could be in another.
Possibly, the weekly schedule is dependent on the daily schedule to complete.
Do not organize schedules just by frequency. For example, do not have a
Monday schedule. There should not be one schedule just for requested jobs,
either, unless it is easily manageable. Instead, try to keep application-related
jobs together. This makes interdependencies within applications much clearer.
6-4 Unicenter CA-Scheduler User Guide