Back when IBM i 7.5 was announced, IBM also announced several licensed programs that no longer cost any money to get a license for. Out of this list of programs there are two that stand out: DB2 Symmetrical Multiprocessing and Advanced Job Scheduler. Let’s take a few minutes to see if you should consider trying either of these solutions.
DB2 Symmetrical Multiprocessing (we’ll call it SMP for short) has often been used as a possible solution to processing bottlenecks before paying to unlock an extra processor core for IBM i, which is quite expensive. To really take advantage of SMP, you must first have two or more processors licensed for IBM i on your system. After installing SMP on your systems, you can manually run queriers and tell them to use SMP parallel, or you can simply modify the QQRYDEGREE system value and give it a value of *OPTIMIZE to let the operating system determine the right times to enable it. Try running some long running queries with SMP parallel off and on to compare times and see if there is a time savings.
Advanced Job Scheduler is a separate solution from the native job scheduler on IBM i. As the name implies, it gives you advanced features for scheduling that you do not get in the native one. Here are three things I like about the advanced job scheduler that might be useful for you:
Calendars: If you have an end-of-month that is never on the same day each month, you can create a Calendar and place each of the end-of-month dates on it for the year. Then, you can tell your end-of-month job to run based on what your Calendar says.
Sequences: Maybe you want several commands to run in sequence at the time you’ve specified the job to run. You can line up a multitude of commands to one right after the other instead of having to schedule multiple entries or create a program.
Job History: Would you like to go back and see the last several weeks that a job has run to see if it’s been running normally or been ending abnormally or been running at all? AJS lets you quickly see that in the history log it keeps for each scheduled entry.
Both solutions sound great, right? The best way to obtain these licensed programs is to contact your IBM Business Partner and …
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