Managing Categories
A category is an independent pool of worker jobs for the Work Queue Manager. When you initialize a set of worker jobs, you can specify the category that supplies the workers. If any of the worker jobs in the set request additional worker jobs while executing work items, then the new worker jobs are from the same category.
Each work category always has at least one worker job available to immediately process work items. The category also has a maximum number of additional worker jobs that can be simultaneously working.
For example, suppose that you assign a maximum of eight workers to the SQL category supplied by the system. Then, suppose that you create a category for processes related to building Business Intelligence cubes, and assign a maximum of four workers to that category. Then whatever processing is occurring in the SQL category, the workers in the BusinessIntelligence category are available to process their work items immediately.
System Categories
The system includes two categories that you cannot delete: SQL and Default. The SQL category is for any SQL processing performed by the system, including parallel processing of queries. The Default category supplies worker jobs when you initialize a set of worker jobs without specifying a category.
Category Properties
Each category has properties that affect the behavior of each work queue in the category. These properties are:
When a work queue in this category is created and no worker job count is specified, this becomes the number of worker jobs in the work queue. The default value for this property is the number of cores.
Maximum number of active worker jobs kept in the pool of jobs servicing requests in this category (in addition to the one job that is always available). Idle jobs are detected and new jobs are started automatically to keep the maximum active job number around this limit. The default value is twice the number of cores.
Maximum number of worker jobs for a work queue in this category. If you specify a larger number of worker jobs when creating the work queue, this limit is used instead. The default is twice the number of cores.
Creating, Modifying, and Deleting Categories
You can create categories, adjust category properties, and delete custom categories in the Management Portal. See Configuring Work Queue Manager Categories.
If you prefer, you can also work with categories using the Config.WorkQueuesOpens in a new tab APIs.
