How to use Dummy Jobs to your advantage in Control-M V8.

Recently I was working with a customer who had a number of IBM Datastage jobs that all had set of standard schedules and varying unique schedules. These all needed to be dependent on each other. When trying to solution this, I  ran into an issue trying to incorporate all of the job flows into one big flow. This was because all of the unique schedule criteria made things difficult. For example we had easy jobs that ran on M-F, but we needed to incorporate the jobs with the unique job schedules into the jobs with the easy schedules. Lets say that JOBA, JOBB and JOBD are the M-F jobs. JOBTHURSC is only scheduled to run on Thursday. Without using the “CTM_FOLDER_ADJUST_DUMMY” parameter the jobs would order M-F but the JOBTHURSC would not be present except on Thursdays. This will cause you issues everyday except for Thursday because JOBB would finish and not see JOBTHURSC and would cause JOBD never to execute because it would be looking for JOBTHURSC.

To solve for this I came across the “CTM_FOLDER_ADJUST_DUMMY” parameter. By adding the parameter into my environment ,this allowed me to solve for my Thursday job always being in the flow as a DUMMY JOB but only running when it was not its day to run. You will then have to create a Smart Folder for your jobs. The parameter tells the Smart Folder to always order every job in the Smart Folder according to the scheduling criteria of the Smart Folder. If a job’s individual schedule is not that particular order date then set it to run as a “DUMMY” job. If you look closely at the job flow screenshot,you notice the purple ghost symbol. (I think it is the bad guys from Pac-Man.) This is the indicator that the job is set to dummy. When I tested this flow out it was a Monday, so all the jobs ordered in the Smart Folder because in this case the Smart Folder’s schedule is set to EVERYDAY. The Thursday job ordered even though it was Monday but it ran as a DUMMY JOB. So the DUMMY JOB in this case called JOBTHURSC becomes a placeholder to keep the flow inline without having any gaps because it is not Thursday. This solution very happy. The customer’s current setup within Datastage Director did not account for this and caused them to have to run some jobs manually at particular times to accommodate for their needs. Meaning somebody from that team might be getting up at 5am to kick off things in certain time windows. Hopefully this solution keeps allows the customer to focus more on their other Datastage tasks and leave the scheduling to me and Control-M.

Listed below are the instructions for Version 8 from the Knowledgebase.

1. Log in to the Control-M Configuration Manager.

2. Right click on the Control-M/Server that this table resides on and choose system parameters.

3. Find the parameter named “CTM_FOLDER_ADJUST_DUMMY” and change the value to Y.

4. Restart the Control-M/Server

5. Go back to the planning environment  and create a Smart Folder for the jobs you need to solution this for.

6. In the Smartfolder properties select the pre-requisites tab. Within there will be an option called Adjust Condition. Set this to YES.