Dbms_job - prevent automatic re-run of a one-time background job.

Question

We have a job which dynamically spawns 5 background processes, each take roughly 2 hours to run (2 hours total, 10 hours if ran synchronous).
sys.dbms_job.submit(job => vJob2,
what => 'myProc;' );
COMMIT;
Sometimes in development there is such a huge load that some of the 5 background processes will receive a snapshot too old error. DBMS_JOB automatically re-starts the same job (vJob2) 16 times, but I don't want it to. I try to manually set the job to "broken" but the job number can no longer be seen (even though it is in the job queue) I get the error:
ORA-23421 Job number X is not a job in the job queue
First question, is there an init param that I can lower the value "16" to some lower number?
Second question, once I'm caught in this situation where I know the current job running is going to fail, how do I prevent it from automatically restarting yet again?
What I have tried:
Alter the job queue to 0, kill the sessions (whew! Nothing is running now, good!).
then try to set broken to "TRUE", but I get the annoying ORA-23421 because, well I don't know why. So when I put the job queue back to 4, off they start again.
Tried dropping the jobs, get same ORA-23421 message even though I can select those job numbers in a query and I can see them in my IDE interface.
Also, I am running as the user who submitted the jobs, so there is no permission issue here (e.g. submitted as user A, trying to set to broken or drop the job as person B).
Our Oracle RDBMS is 9.2.0.6 AIX.
Message was edited by:
johnsok

Answer 1

I found this on asktom, which will prevent a DBMS_JOB proc/func/package from automatically re-starting. The basic premise is that whatever you are executing in the "what" command must not be led to think an error occurred even if it did.
Luckily in the following example, we already handled exceptions in the "myProc" code to capture errors in a log table, so this approach will work for us:
sys.dbms_job.submit(job => vJob2,
what => 'begin myProc; exception when others then null; end;' );
COMMIT;
I would still love to be able control the arbitrary number "16" though. Oh well.
--Kate