DSXchange

I have been a user of dsxchange for some time, but alas never a poster. I am very familiar wilth the entire tool suite, and have been using it for 5 - 6 years. I am currently at a client which has some prettty harse production server access issues. This is a DS EE client running version 7.5.1a on AIX. We have mostly px jobs but a few Server jobs as well. Also we may have a few PX jobs with Basic transformers as well which prevents any Osh only migrations/implementations. In this production model it has been suggested that we have no production server access via DS clients. We will run jobs via external scheduler(zeke) and are invoking sequencers and DS jobs in turn of course. All of the execution side is not the issue. What are the toughts on prod support issues surrounding job logs, browsing of intermediate PX Datasets, etc.

What sort of thoughts are you interested in? You've explained the customer's setup in detail and it sounds like they have reasons for all of their configuration settings; so whether someone thinks the configuration makes sense or not won't make a difference.

What kind of thoughts are you interested in or seeking?

Sorry I thought that is what I put in the last line of the details.
If anyone is supporting this type of environment,
How do you deal with viewing of job logs?
How do you view intermediate files? Does anybody have anything in place which copies or moves this type of information to shadow or ghosts environments? What other ideas and thoughts do folks have for viewing of log information or other typical items used during problem resolution.

It would be very difficult to bar "production access from DataStage clients". I've not seen this requirement at any site. Most use Version Control or other means to make job designs read-only; it's kind of vital to have access to the logs unless you want to create job sequence activities or after-job subroutines that email, or write elsewhere, everything that goes into the log. As for other tools such as the Data Set Manager or Configuration File Editor, while there are command line alternatives (such as orchadmin), what would be the likelihood that "they" would give you command line access to the production system?!

Thanks Ray

That was my thoughts as well. I suppose I could add job activities to the sequencers which email log contents to a shared mailbox in the event of warnings and failures. Also, I have typically pulled job/link statisics(process metadata) for non-metastage clients and placed these in the target RDMS. Issues surounding other common activities are up for grabs...and your right no command line access either!