DSXchange

We were thinking of automatically making backup copies of all of the DataStage jobs every night. The problem we're currently facing is that sometimes people leave DataStage open overnight or their connection drops and their Designer job remains locked, when we then schedule an automatic export of the jobs this fails because of the locks.

The idea we had was to "unlock" all users before attempting an export but this also doesn't seem obvious without root account access (damn permissions ).

Does anyone else do automated backups with DataStage, and if so how?

Regards,
Ogmios

Are you using the command line export? If not, see some info on dsexport.exe in your DataStage client directory from this thread:
http://www.tools4datastage.com/forum/to ... C_ID=81619

I believe dsexport.exe may have changed to dscmdexport.exe for release 5.2 and up...I have a DOS batch using this command to do automated and manual backups, and I'll submit the code to DSX for inclusion under the http://www.datastagexchange.com/etlarticlelist.php section of DSX, so check for that in a few days.

If I'm remembering correctly, the command line export will ignore locked jobs, but I'm not for sure.

It is right, any tool trying to export DataStage components gets an error when this element is looked by a user. There are ways to blow this users out, by for example restarting DataStage. But best way is to get dicipline into the designer-community. Those who have forgotten to log off have do clean the dishes.

If you set those users' inactivity timeout to, say, 60 minutes, then one hour after they leave their sessions idle they are cleanly logged out, nothing left locked.

ray.wurlod wrote:If you set those users' inactivity timeout to, say, 60 minutes, then one hour after they leave their sessions idle they are cleanly logged out, nothing left locked.

Hahahaha. "Cleanly." Hahaha.

It took us 3 weeks to figure out what the heck was going on with the strange error messages. Once we realized that DataStage client was just disconnected from the server, we quickly increased the idle time to 12 hours.

As for archiving current resources, this is why I am so looking forward to Twister with its check in/out capability. It should allow for the administrator to archive the current version, disregardly of whether someone else is editing it or not.

A little tale, we use Tru-64, and we back up the actual diskspace where DataStage's Project folders are stored. Recently, a co-worker inadvertingly overwrote 4 day worth of work, so we called in the IS team to restore it from the backup the night before. It didn't work. Nor the night before. Nor the night before that...

Right now, we're looking into the reasons why the backup system failed. Teach ya to not trust backups too automatically.

-T.J.