How to schedule a procedure to run inside a period of time

How many of us have had to schedule a job to run inside an Oracle Database? I believe this is one of the most common task that a DBA performs. But, some time the request doesn't end there, how about if the job is longer that we think? how about if we only want that job to run inside an period of time regardless if the job completed all the work or the job only completed 50%, 40% of the work? In order to comply that we have to play with some objects inside Oracle Database called: Schedules, Windows, Programs, Procedures, Jobs and Jobs attributes. This is what I will teach you in this articles. We will create a produce that will be executed by a Job only inside a period of time, if the procedure is longer than that period of time the job will be stopped and re-started in the next run, as a result the procedure will be stopped too. Let me show you the concept of the objects that we will work with, directly from Oracle Documentation:

Procedure: A procedure is a group of PL/SQL statements that you can call by name. A call specification declares a Java method or a third-generation language (3GL) routine so that it can be called from SQL and PL/SQL. For our case, The code that will be executed with the Job. Read more here.

Program: A program is a collection of metadata about a particular task. Read More here.

Job: A job is the combination of a schedule and a program, along with any additional arguments required by the program. Read more here.

Job Attribute: If the program that the job executes uses input variables, then we can set the value of those attributes using "Job Attributes".

Schedule: A schedule defines when a job should be run or when a window should open. Read more here.

Window: Windows provide a way to automatically activate different resource plans at different times. Read more here. When we create our "Window", we will create it with priority "HIGH". There may be only one "Window" Open at the same time, so all the other windows that have "LOW" priority will be stopped and our "Window" will be open. For example in the following image, between 6:00am and 9:00am there is already other Window Open, the "Window 1", however since the "Window 3" as "HIGH" priority, the "Window 1" is closed and the "Window 3" is open. When the "Window 3" completes the "Window 1" will be re-open at 9:00am because the duration is longer than "Window 3".

So let's start. The goal of this article will be to run the procedure "dgomez.myprocedure" only on the days Saturday and Sundays and only between 9:00am and 12:00pm. Regardless if the procedure completes or not, the procedure will be stopped at 12:00pm.

We will go through the following Steps:

Creating a Procedure
Creating a Schedule
Creating a Window
Creating a Window Group
Creating a program
Creating a Job
Setting Job Attributes
Verifying the Setup

Creating Procedure:

I will leave the logic empty, since what matters here is the structure to build a procedure that run only inside a specific period of time. The idea is that you create your procedure as you want. I will use only one input variable (var1) but you can use as many as you need.

SQL> CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE dgomez.myprocedure (var1 IN NUMBER)
AS
BEGIN
null;
--Procedure Logic here.
END;
/
Procedure created.

Creating Schedule:

Now let's create the "Schedule" where we will say when the procedure will run. You can see the "Schedule" as the answer for the question "When the procedure will start?"

SQL> Begin
DBMS_SCHEDULER.CREATE_SCHEDULE (
schedule_name => 'WEEKENDS_SCHEDULE',
start_date => NULL,
repeat_interval => 'freq=daily;byhour=9;byminute=0;bysecond=0;byday=SAT,SUN',
end_date => NULL,
comments => 'for Saturday and Sunday, it will start at 09:00 am');
End;
/