Viewing all of the subsystems autostart jobs in one place

If I needed to see which autostart jobs were in my IBM i partitions I would either have to use the Display Subsystem Description command, DSPSBSD, to view the autostart jobs for each subsystem or use an API. Fortunately the latest Technology Refreshes include a Db2 for i View that gives me the information I want.

Before I give examples of using the new View I want to show how to get to the same information using the DSPSBSD command so that you can compare the data from the two.

If I want to see what autostart jobs there are in the QCTL subsystem I would use the following command:

DSPSBSD SBSD(QCTL)

When the Enter key is pressed the following menu is displayed:

Display Subsystem Description Subsystem description: QCTL Status: ACTIVE Select one of the following: 1. Operational attributes 2. Pool definitions 3. Autostart job entries 4. Work station name entries 5. Work station type entries 6. Job queue entries 7. Routing entries 8. Communications entries 9. Remote location name entries 10. Prestart job entries

I take option 3, and the following is displayed:

Display Autostart Job Entries Subsystem description: QCTL Job Job Description Library QSTRUPJD QSTRUPJD QSYS

As you can imagine this takes time to get the information about the autostart jobs in one subsystem. If I wanted to know all the autostart jobs from multiple subsystems I would have to repeat this for each one. This is when the existing method becomes a pain!

Now I can use the SQL View: AUTOSTART_JOB_INFO, which is found in the library QSYS2. This View has just five columns. I am not going to list them here as the columns' name describe what is contained within.

Let me display the same information:

SELECT * FROM QSYS2.AUTOSTART_JOB_INFO WHERE SUBSYSTEM_DESCRIPTION = 'QCTL' AND SUBSYSTEM_DESCRIPTION_LIBRARY = 'QSYS'

Here I am displaying all the columns from the View, but only from the subsystem description QCTL in the library QSYS.

SUBSYSTEM AUTOSTART JOB _DESCRIPTION SUBSYSTEM _JOB _DESCRIPTION JOB _LIBRARY _DESCRIPTION _NAME _LIBRARY _DESCRIPTION ------------ ------------ --------- ------------ ------------ QSYS QCTL QSTRUPJD QSYS QSTRUPJD

That was easy. Now how about all the autostart jobs from all subsystems:

SELECT * FROM QSYS2.AUTOSTART_JOB_INFO ORDER BY 1,2,3

I could not be bothered to enter the column names for the sort, I just entered the number that corresponds to where in the View the column is found.

The results, below, are just a subset of what was returned:

SUBSYSTEM AUTOSTART JOB _DESCRIPTION SUBSYSTEM _JOB _DESCRIPTION JOB _LIBRARY _DESCRIPTION _NAME _LIBRARY _DESCRIPTION ------------ ------------ --------- ------------ ------------ QBRM Q1ABRMNET QBRMNET QBRM Q1ACNETJD QINMEDIA QBASE QSTRUPJD QSYS QSTRUPJD QINMEDIA QCTL QSTRUPJD QSYS QSTRUPJD QINMEDIA QSNADS QZDSTART QGPL QSNADS

That was so easy, especially when compared to how it would have to be done using the DSPSBSD command:

1. Find all of the subsystem description objects.
2. Use the DSPSBSD command for each one, as I do not know which ones have autostart jobs and which do not.
3. Take option 3 from the menu.
4. Record the names and whatever else I need of each autostart job..
5. Go to step 2.

This would take a long time. Using the View will save me all that time I can use for doing something more productive.

 

You can learn more about the AUTOSTART_JOB_INFO SQL View from the IBM website here.

 

This article was written for IBM i 7.4 TR2 and 7.3 TR8.