User Variables eliminate restartability

mfavero · Post by **mfavero** » Mon Aug 11, 2008 9:43 am

I am finding that if I restart a sequence, the user variables are not saved. Is this a bug or am I missing something? If the user variables are referenced after a restart (in which the user variable activity is not run again of course) they are NULL. This makes the sequence NOT RESTARTABLE. We are running 8.0.1 with fix pack 1a.

chulett · Post by **chulett** » Mon Aug 11, 2008 9:56 am

Why not mark that stage as "Do Not Checkpoint"?

mfavero · Post by **mfavero** » Mon Aug 11, 2008 10:54 am

There is no checkbox for "Do not checkpoint run" in the User variables stage.

chulett · Post by **chulett** » Mon Aug 11, 2008 11:23 am

Then it should not be checkpointed and should always run. Are you certain it is being skipped?

mfavero · Post by **mfavero** » Tue Aug 12, 2008 2:46 pm

I went back and double checked and then ran some tests. You are correct in that the user variables always get rerun on a restart. So if the variables are defined as static or coming from an external source, everything is OK. I got into trouble because one of the user variables was gotten from a previous stage which ran perfectly the first time and did not run again. In fact this stage cannot be rerun on restart. The value that this stage returns needs to be preserved for restart. It is a UNIX script which produces a temp table name for a detached partition in DB2.

I am rewriting the script to store the temp table name in a flat file. Then the user variable which wants to hold this table name will be changed to call a routine to read the flat file and retrieve the value of the table name.