Killing the Oracle DBMS_JOB - Page 2

Bringing Down a DBMS_JOB

1. Find the Job You Want to Bring Down
In order to do anything you first need to find the job that is giving you a headache. Go ahead and run the running_jobs.sql. This will give you the prime information, job, sid, serial#, and spid, for the following actions in bringing down the job.

2. Mark the DBMS_JOB as Broken
Use the following command for the job that you have to deal with.

SQL> EXEC DBMS_JOB.BROKEN(job#,TRUE);

All this command does is mark the job so that if we get it to stop, it won't start again. Let's make one thing perfectly clear, after executing this command the job is still running.

As a side note, if you are trying to shut down a database with jobs that run throughout the day, they may hinder your attempts to bring down the database cleanly. This is a wonderful command to make sure no jobs are executing during the shutdown process. Just be aware that you will need to mark the jobs as unbroken when the database comes back up, more on that later.

Since the job is still running and it isn't going to end soon, you will need to kill the Oracle session that is executing the job. Use the following command for to kill the job.

ALTER SYSTEM KILL SESSION 'sid,serial#';

More often than not the previous step will still leave the job attached to the database and still running. When this happens you will need to go out to the operating system level and get rid of the process that has spawned from the running job. In order to do this you must login to the database box and issue the following command, depending on the type of operating system you have.

For Windows, at the DOS Prompt: orakill sid spid

For UNIX at the command line> kill '9 spid

The orakill is an Oracle command, while kill is a Unix command.

Re-run the session_jobs.sql script to see if you have gotten rid of the job. If you have there is no reason to go further. Usually steps 1 through 4 will be sufficient to get rid of a job but when the job is running wild you will have to continue with steps 6 through 11 which describes a process for bouncing the job queue process.

6. Determine the Current Number of Job Queue Processes

SQL> col value for a10
SQL> select name,value from v$parameter where name = 'job_queue_processes'; 

7. Alter the Job Queue to Zero

SQL> ALTER SYSTEM SET job_queue_processes = 0;

This will bring down the entire job queue processes.

8. Validate that No Processes are Using the Job Queue
Re-run the session_jobs.sql script to see if any jobs are still running. Since we have given a hard stop to the job queue and issued the kill commands, you can now wait until no more jobs are running. After all the jobs have quit running, you can do whatever maintenance or tuning you need to do before proceeding.

9. Mark the DBMS_JOB as Not Broken
You can now reset the broken job to not broken so they can run again. Just issue the command.

SQL>EXEC DBMS_JOB.BROKEN(job#,FALSE):

10. Alter the Job Queue to Original Value
Set the job queue to its' original value so that the jobs can run again.

ALTER SYSTEM SET job_queue_processes = original_value;

11. Validate that DBMS_JOB Is Running
To make sure everything is back to normal, re-run the above scripts to validate that jobs are scheduled, not broken, and are executing with the next and last dates columns changing.

Oracle have given us a great tool for scheduling activities within the database. As with many things inside the database, not everything goes as planned, nor are we given adequate tools to fix some of the problems we encounter. With the eleven steps outlined here, hopefully you will have increased your arsenal to handle those run away jobs that have given the best of us a few tense moments.

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