Milan Babuskov wrote:

>Simon Carter wrote:
>
>
>>Recently someone said that if you have a proposal, throw it on this
>>list. So, my first proposal is FIST (FIrebird Scheduled Tasks). I
>>have a brief description of it below, which outlines how I would like
>>to see it. I appreciate it may be technically impossible/improbable,
>>and has more holes than your average tea bag, but you never know until
>>you ask :-)
>>
>>
>[cut: a list of requirements]
>
>Everything you wrote can be (and is) done via cron and appropriate
>utilities. At least on Linux. Linux admins use cron, sendmail, and many
>other utilities for such tasks. Those tools have proven to be reliable
>over time. Adding FIST to firebird is duplicating work already done,
>reinventing the wheel, and a wooden one there, as it would take time to
>get all the features working properly. With current set of tools the
>user has great flexibilty which would have to be programmed.
>
>

I disagree strongly. Having the database schedule tasks from a known
account is extremely powerful. It is also platform independent, unlike
cron. It also avoid any problems related to embedding passwords in
command files.

>The only benefit I can see is ability to manage the tasks via SQL which
>can be good if you're only DBA and not sysadmin. But, if I was sysadmin
>I wouldn't like DBA's to be able run setup such stuff themselves anyway,
>I'd rather give them their own cron jobs which I can easily constrain
>without having to mess with database server.
>
>

Surely you would concede that shipping the database with a procedure
that could backup the database on a regular schedule would be a
wonderful thing that any sane DBA would love.