IBM Mainframe Forum

Hi,

Does OPC support a specification of 'mutually exclusive' jobs? Here is what I want to do:

Job A and Job B have no relationships regarding dependencies. However, both jobs require access to the same Tape dataset. Usually both jobs are invoked at around the same time of day, which means that one of them will wait on contention for the tape dataset. Sometimes Job A starts first and grabs the tape file, but other times Job B starts first.
Both jobs are in the critical path for the batch cycle completion, so I don't really want to make Job A a dependency of Job B or vice versa. What I'd like to do is tell OPC that these jobs cannot run at the same time, so if Job B starts first, Job A will wait for Job B to finish, and if Job A start first, Job B will wait for Job A to finish.

Does OPC support this type of specification? I have several such contention issues in the batch cycle and I'd rather not start adding dependency specifications making one job wait on the other. Basically, sometimes Job B starts first and is completed before Job A and sometimes its the other way around. So I don't want to have either of these jobs specifically wait on the other one if the job can be completed before the other even starts. If I make Job B wait on Job A, then if Job B is ready to start and can be completed before Job A starts, Job B will be waiting for no reason.

Also, the dataset that these jobs need is on tape and cannot be put on disk for many reasons including available DASD and several other reasons, so moving the file to disk is not an option.

Thanks for any assistance...

Hello santlou and welcome to the forums,

To do what you want, you can define a "special resource".

This will allow you to "enqueue" on that resource and when something has it in use, others will have to wait.

Thanx...
I will look into that.

..santlou

You're welcome - good luck

d