Sequence and User Variable Activity stage during restart

JPalatianos · Post by **JPalatianos** » Wed Feb 01, 2017 2:35 pm

Hi,
I was curious what the behavior is when a sequence restarts. Specifically on the User Variable Activity that is before the job failure.
For example...we have 2 jobs followed by the user variable activity followed by 7 jobs. If the job 6 after the UVA aborts and we reastart we assumed that the UVA would not rerun on restart.
During one of the failures it appears it is rerunning but we do not see anything in the director log for this.
what is the behavior on the UVA stage on restart?
Thanks - - John

chulett · Post by **chulett** » Wed Feb 01, 2017 5:01 pm

I'm not aware of any special 'restart rules' for the UVA stage so I assume it follows all of the normal rules. Meaning, once it has been 'checkpointed' it will not run on restart and you would override that behavior by enabling the 'Do not checkpoint' property. But it's been quite a while and things may have changed (or be broken) in the latest release. Hopefully someone has direct experience with this who can chime in.

Out of curiosity, what behavior do you see that makes you think it is rerunning?

JPalatianos · Post by **JPalatianos** » Wed Feb 01, 2017 5:18 pm

Hi Craig,
We had the sequence initially kick of at 9:39 PM and one of the jobs aborted. We then restarted the sequence at 11:39 PM and one of the variables in the User Variable stage uses the macro DSJobStartTimestamp for an assignment. We found that one of the later jobs that ran the second time around and uses this variable had a timestamp of when the sequence ran the second time on restart:
jpSeqStartTimeStamp=2017-01-30 23:39:19

where we were assuming it would keep the value from the initial failed run.
jpSeqStartTimeStamp=2017-01-30 21:39:00

I also noticed that the UVA stage does not have a checkbox for 'Do not checkpoint' property.

Thanks - - John

chulett · Post by **chulett** » Wed Feb 01, 2017 10:25 pm

JPalatianos wrote:I also noticed that the UVA stage does not have a checkbox for 'Do not checkpoint' property.

Was wondering about that... gonna have to defer to others on this one.

JRodriguez · Post by **JRodriguez** » Thu Feb 02, 2017 6:29 am

....As far as I know, that's the default behaviour since they were introduced. User variables are re-evaluate each time due to the lack of check point property

JPalatianos · Post by **JPalatianos** » Thu Feb 02, 2017 7:24 am

Thank You for all the responses...I will ask IBM if there is any way to override this behavior and post back to the chat when I hear back.

UCDI · Post by **UCDI** » Thu Feb 02, 2017 8:59 am

you can work around it with 2 UVs ... the first one is "normal" and in-between you can dump them all to a flat file, the second one gets them from the flat file, and the flat file writer can be check-pointed. If nothing else works, this might.

FranklinE · Post by **FranklinE** » Fri Feb 03, 2017 11:36 am

This is the right view. Macro-based variables always evaluate at runtime, regardless of previous values in a restart scenario. Any such value that you must retain on restarts needs to be saved and referenced where needed upon restart.

How you do that will be complicated. Please post about your efforts and results.

UCDI · Post by **UCDI** » Fri Feb 03, 2017 11:47 am

The other way is you can back the "then" value out of the job log and force it through somehow, which may be minor or major hassle depending on the design, number of values affected, and such.