About Scheduling Servers

SAS supports scheduling through four different types of scheduling servers: The type that you choose depends on the level of scheduling functions your organization requires, the budget and resources available to support a scheduling server, and the applications that will be creating jobs to be scheduled. When you create a flow in SAS Management Console's Schedule Manager, you specify which scheduling server the flow is to be associated with. Schedule Manager then passes the flow information to the appropriate scheduling server.

You can create a definition for a scheduling server by using the Server Manager plug-in in SAS Management Console or an application that directly schedules jobs.

The following topics contain an overview of each of the types of scheduling servers.

The Platform Process Manager server, which is part of Platform Suite for SAS, provides full-featured enterprise scheduling capabilities, including features such as workload prioritization and policy-based scheduling. The server enables you to schedule jobs using a variety of recurrence criteria and dependencies on other jobs, time events, or file events. You can use the Flow Manager application (also part of Platform Suite for SAS) to manage scheduled jobs, including deleting and stopping previously scheduled jobs.

Because Platform Suite for SAS is a separate application, it requires an additional license fee. It also requires you to perform additional tasks to install, configure, and maintain all components of the application. However, the components included with the application also provide functions such as load balancing and submission of jobs to a grid.

The metadata for a Process Manager Server includes the following information:

Operating system scheduling provides the ability to schedule jobs through the services provided through a server's operating system. Using operating system scheduling provides a basic level of scheduling at no additional cost, because the service is provided by software you already own. However, this type of scheduling does not support advanced scheduling capabilities, such as the use of many types of dependencies. The specific scheduling functions that are supported vary according to the operating system used, which can make it more difficult to set up consistent scheduling criteria on several servers. Managing scheduled jobs requires you to issue operating system commands, rather than using a graphical user interface.

The metadata for an operating system scheduling server includes the following:

Distributed in-process scheduling provides basic scheduling services for scheduling jobs directly from certain SAS applications (such as the SAS Web Infrastructure Platform and SAS Web Report Studio). The scheduling server also has the capability to schedule flows from the Schedule Manager plug-in for SAS Management Console. This type of scheduling server does not provide the control that is provided by the Platform Process Manager server, and because it is not scalable, it is not suitable for use with a grid. However, it offers basic scheduling capabilities without incurring any additional cost or requiring many installation or configuration tasks

In-process scheduling provides the ability to schedule jobs from certain Web-based SAS applications without using a separate scheduling server. With in-process scheduling, the scheduling functions run as a process within the application. Although in-process scheduling is supported only for certain applications (such as SAS Web Report Studio), it offers basic scheduling capabilities without incurring any additional cost or requiring many installation or configuration tasks. Because an in-process scheduling server runs as part of the application, this type of scheduling also eliminates the need for the application to authenticate scheduled jobs to a separate server. However, the application must be running at the time the scheduled job attempts to run.