Re: AIX - i5/OS feature comparison was the notorious Steve's soapbox

On 9/7/06, Evan Harris <spanner@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi Steve

Mostly we've been down this track before - it just seems that you
either forget or ignore all the additional features that i5/OS brings
to the table that get pointed out to you by folks on this list. As
pointed out many times in this list, the operating systems you keep
mentioning and using for comparative purposes are not equal, and are,
in fact, nowhere near equal. Just for starters, neither of them have
an integrated database.

As another example, neither AIX or Linux have job queues or
subsystems. Managing job schedules is a challenge due to the lack of
simple and effective queueing. You can code around this to provide
the same ease of use and manageability that the simple job queue
gives you but you have to do it yourself or install some third party
stuff. Often you will see CPU wasted simply because jobs are
scheduled with start and end times that are "certain" not to overlap
(and then chaos when those jobs DO run concurrently). Most unix
administrators envy the simple ability to stack jobs up in a jobqueue.

Evan,

I asked this question on the AIX list back in the spring [1] . I have
not worked with AIX yet so I cant say for sure who is right and who is
wrong.  Here is part of the answer:

The  "at" command that can be used to start a batched job now or at a
specific time. There is also the cron daemon that lets you submit a job
on a regular basis, such as every morning at 8am. There is the "atq"
command to show what is in the queue, and "atrm" command to cancel
jobs.

Our company created special "batch" queues in the qdaemon subsystem
that lets us queue up batch jobs much like you would do for a print
job. For example, we create a short script that sets our environment
and then calls a COBOL program, and then we simply use the lp command
to submit to that queue, whose backend program is /bin/ksh instead of
piobe (the standard printer I/O backend).

CPU usage can be seen for each process using the ps command

-Steve

[1] 
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.unix.aix/browse_frm/thread/c6e2aaad64e60459/ac764707387e002b?lnk=gst&q=job+queue&rnum=2#ac764707387e002b