Any reason why external jobs hang?

Question

Hi
I'm in two minds as to whether this as an XE database problem or a general Scheduler problem so I'm trying my luck on this forum first.
Details: Database XE, Centos O/S
Problem
I can schedule all the different types of jobs and all except external jobs(job_type EXECUTABLE) do run. With external jobs, they just never complete running. It's not like they are doing anything either.
- Selecting from USER_SCHEDULER_RUNNING_JOBS while an external job is running just never comes back.
- Checking what's going on in v$session reveals an ACTIVE status and EVENT "JS external job".
- The xe_J00X os process doesn't seem to be doing anything. However, if I terminate(kill) it, it won't die except with kill -9, which frees up the database.
I have searched and tried a number of ideas but I haven't been able to resolve this.
So far
- I have tried the Metalink notes for setting permissions to nobody user.
- I have added #!/bin/ksh or #!/bin/bash to the shell scripts
- Implemented externaljob.ora
The results are the same. External jobs just hang, no error message, nothing.
I'd appreciate help if you can.
Thank you.
Siphiwe

Answer 1

Hi,
This is helpful and I can add some further comments.
- The Metalink notes were intended for normal SE/EE Oracle installs, there is no guarantee that they will work on XE. In fact your experiment shows that setting the permissions as in the Metalink note does not work on XE since nobody does not have access to the libclntsh.so.10.1 library (file and directory permissions are slightly different in XE) . You should ignore the Metalink notes and leave the original install permissions.
- because there is no extjobo executable, external jobs in the SYS schema will not work (although doing "cp extjob extjobo" should fix this) . This is a known filed bug.
- because the Metalink note does not work, all external jobs will run as the Oracle user. This is a security risk that should be taken into account whenever granting the CREATE EXTERNAL JOB system privilege to a user.
I can confirm that on an rpm installation of oracle-xe the following works for me when run as sys
-- test case for an external job on Oracle XE
create user testusr identified by testusr ;
grant create session, resource, create job, create external job to testusr;
connect testusr/testusr
begin
dbms_scheduler.create_job('job1','executable','/bin/sleep',1,
enabled=>false);
dbms_scheduler.set_job_argument_value('job1',1,'10');
dbms_scheduler.enable('job1');
end;
select * from all_scheduler_running_jobs;
select * from all_scheduler_job_run_details;
The job does run successfully and runs for 10 seconds as expected. I suggest you try this test case out after removing the pj files and fixing the permissions on extjob back to
-r-xr-xr-x 1 oracle dba 32068 Feb 19 2006 extjob*
Hope this helps,
Ravi.
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