DS Scheduler and Daylight Savings Time

[bradinmi]

This morning was interesting. Daylight Savings Time went into effect this morning at 2:00am here in the US. Our Windows 2000 Advanced Server properly adjusted itself for the time change, and DS Director is showing the correct time.

We had a job scheduled to run this morning at 07:30. It ran (adjusted for DST) at 08:30. The time also showed properly as 08:30 in the DS Director. Hmmmmm. FYI, we're running DS 5.2r1.

So, out of curiousity, I went into the scheduler (where we have more jobs scheduled to run late this afternoon), and tried an experiment. I sorted the display in the scheduler by "To be run". Thus, they're in date/time order, followed by alphabetical of the jobnames. I took one of the many that are scheduled for the same time this afternoon (05:00pm) which started with the word Employer and merely rescheduled it, overtyping the start time with the same value. Guess what? For all the jobs scheduled for 05:00pm today, it jumped to the top of the list, even though alphabetically this job should not have listed first.

What does it tell me? That somewhere "inside" the scheduler the start times are stored in a manner that does not adjust to time changes. Is my assumption correct? Is there a way to plan on this come the Fall (when we switch back to standard time)?

Thanks!


Brad Vincent
Compuware @ The Detroit Medical Center

[chulett]

We run a Unix server and use "cron" as our scheduler. I've had absolutely no issues with DST and scheduled jobs - or at least none that I'm aware of. [:D]

I'm curious about one of your statements: "We had a job scheduled to run this morning at 07:30. It ran (adjusted for DST) at 08:30. The time also showed properly as 08:30 in the DS Director." To me this is *far* from proper, unless I'm missing the meaning of "adjusted for DST". If I scheduled something for 7:30 on the morning of the DST change, it should still have run at *7:30*, not 8:30. Perhaps that's a quirk of your "scheduler"... or of my understanding. [:I]

Have you played around more with this issue? Found anything else out to back up your assumption? Curious minds want to know.

-craig

[bradinmi]

Hi Craig,

Nope, you read it correctly. The job, though scheduled for 7:30, ran at 8:30, as if the scheduler was thinking, "I go by when the sun goes up, I ain't following no DST!!" [:o)]

Since this only happens once a year, I wasn't able to test anything further. We had upgraded to DS 5.2r3 late last year. I don't recall if it was before the change back to standard time. Maybe I can set up a test around that time?

Take care,

Brad Vincent
Compuware @ The Detroit Medical Center

[ray.wurlod]

DataStage does not have its own scheduler; all the Director gives you is an interface to the operating system scheduler - cron or at on UNIX (depending whether it's a "one off" or repeating schedule), or at on Windows.

Consult with your UNIX administrator or manual to figure out how these interact with the system time and, perhaps, the TZ environment variable.