Release Notes (2.8)

Tasks Can Be in Groups

Tasks in the Business Scheduler can now be organized into groups, which you can collapse or expand. A group can have zero or more scheduled tasks of any type. The groups enable you to visually manage a potentially large number of tasks. The groups cannot be scheduled; their only purpose is to visually organize the Business Scheduler Dashboard.

For each task group, the Business Scheduler summarizes the statuses of all the tasks in the group; by design, this is the most important status of the group. For instance, if all tasks in a group are Running, but one task is in Error, the group summary status is Error. This way, even when a group is collapsed, the Business Scheduler displays the status that most needs attention.

Abort Option Now Aborts Scheduled Resource

The Abort button in the Business Scheduler Task Detail page has been enhanced to not only abort a scheduled task that is in the Running Wait status, but also abort the scheduled resource if it is already running, if applicable. For instance, a recipe can be aborted when it is running while a snapshot can’t, so the Abort button will be enabled or disabled for a running task depending on its type.

New Run Modes

The Business Scheduler now supports two new run modes:

• Run After—The task will be run only after another task has been successfully run.

• Run After Dependency—The task will be run every time the dependency is satisfied. In contrast to the previously existing Run on Schedule mode, a dependency expression is required.

For details and examples, see Scheduling a Task.

Run Reports Moved to Business Scheduler

For recipes, the system automatically generates a report that details the results of the execution of the work. (Snapshots and cube builds do not yet have such reports.) 

The Business Scheduler Task Detail page shows the history of all runs of a given scheduled task (run history). With this improvement, each row in the run history will also show a link to the run report, if the scheduled task is a recipe.

It is important to notice that it is no longer possible to reach the run report from the recipe. Such information is now centralized in the Business Scheduler module. To see the run report for a recipe, find its scheduled task in the Business Scheduler, open the task detail so that the task run history is displayed and click the Run Report link of a specific run.

More Granular Time Reporting

The Business Scheduler main page and task details pages both now provide greater detail on the time spent to run the task:

• Task Start Time—When exactly this task started running. 

• Task Wait Time—The amount of time spent on waiting for dependencies such as waiting for an event to arrive or waiting for a previous run of the job to finish (concurrency). 

• Job Start Time—When the job (recipe, snapshot, cube, etc.) actually started running. 

• Job Run Time—How long did it take for the job to finish running. 

• Job End Time—When did the job finish running.

• Total Elapsed Time—How long did the entire task take to run (including waiting time). 

WHEN() and WINDOW() Functions

When scheduling a task, depending on the scheduling mode, you can provide a dependency expression. See Managing Task Dependencies.

As of this release, a dependency expression can use the new WHEN() function. When a task starts running and it has the WHEN(SomeTag) function in its dependency expression, the system will hold the task in the RunningWait status until a business event identified by SomeTag arrives. This business event must arrive/happen after the task reaches the RunningWait status. When such a business event happens, the task will then proceed to Running unless the dependency expression has other conditions that must be satisfied.

Also, the WINDOW() function is now documented. This function enables you to specify a window of time during which the other task has completed. This window of time can span days. For details, see Functions Available in Dependency Expressions. The WINDOW() function was present in previous releases, so this function has also been added to the older documentation.

Bloomberg Connector

The product now supports connecting to Bloomberg data sources, specifically data sources controlled by per security licenses. A per security license enables a customer to fetch data about a few, selected, securities. Bulk licenses are not supported.

Also, if you use the Bloomberg Web Portal to create named datasets, choosing the securities wanted, and the fields needed, the product can consume that dataset; you can have Bloomberg create the dataset in an ad hoc way or via a schedule. The product can now identify and catalog these datasets, and your users can then create recipes that will pull these datasets and can configure the recipes to run on a schedule that matches the one defined by Bloomberg.

See Data Source Details.

FileDir Connector Change

When importing the schema of a CSV file into the Data Catalog, the import process now recognizes quote characters in the column headers of the file. For example, say a CSV file had "City, State" as one of its column headers. While a comma is the delimiter of the file, this comma is contained within quotes and should be escaped. Prior to the fix, City and State were split into two separate fields in the schema definition. With the fix in place, the header of the CSV file is parsed with the quote character factored in, so the field appears as City_State in the schema definition instead. The comma has been converted to an underscore, but this aspect is pre-existing and the agreed upon business logic.

SQL/JDBC Connector

A bug has been fixed where the product would trigger a BUILD INDEX on all staging tables of staging activities that were left in the Staging Error status when the user asked to retry a failed recipe. This caused a lot of unnecessary data processing. This issue had been previously corrected in the case of SQLQuickLoad (LOAD DATA). The same correction has now been applied when not using SQLQuickLoad. 

Faster Recipe Reset

Resetting of recipes is now faster because the truncate and drop table instructions occur outside a transaction, so they will not generate journal entries.

New Validation Functions

New validation functions are available—you can now validate whether a column does/does not match a glob pattern, an InterSystems IRIS pattern, or a regular expression.

Reconciliation Corrections

This version includes the following corrections to reconciliation activities:

• When the user defines a reconciliation primary key map, the product will now automatically create indices on the staging table that will include the fields mentioned on the primary key map so that joining the two tables will be efficient. (Before this fix, the product prevented you from editing the reconciliation primary key map until after the indices were built, which you may have had to initiate.) 

• Reconciliation now correctly handles the case where columns specified in the key map contained null values. (Recall that in reconciliation, the key map describes how to join the two tables in order to compare the records that match.) With this fix, a record is now considered to fail reconciliation if:

  • The record is in the primary source and has all null values for the columns in the key map.

  • The record is in the secondary source, has all null values for the columns in the key map, and the reconciliation is a full outer join (that is, the reconciliation activity uses the option Report Missing Records from Primary Source).

  As a part of the fix, failures resulting from null key map columns are also accurately reflected in a recipe’s reconciliation reports. Note that are still attempted for records that have some null values for columns in the key map. For example, table A is being reconciled against table B. If table A has the columns FirstName and LastName in the reconciliation's key map, and one of its records has a null FirstName but a LastName value of "Smith", then the reconciliation will try to join to a record in table B with <null>,"Smith" in its key map columns. If there is no match, then that record’s reconciliation fails in the same way it did before.

Promotion to Files on S3 Buckets

In this version, it is possible to promote data to CSV files or other files on S3 buckets. That is, when you define a promotion activity, that activity can promote data to files on S3 buckets.