What is a Background Job?
Background jobs are long running tasks which if executed in foreground would occupy a dialog work process for a long time which may affect the dialog performance. Hence, these jobs should be run in background which not only gets the job executed but also doesn’t affect the dialog performance.
A background job can be scheduled to execute a program or a report at a specific time without the intervention of the user. The administrator can monitor the background jobs and can see the results.
Although any job can be executed in the background, the basic reason behind the use of background jobs is to execute those jobs which consume dialog work processes for a very long time, if executed interactively (in the foreground). This impacts the dialog performance.
Hence, following are the areas where background jobs are used:
- When there is a large amount of data to be processed.
- To execute periodic jobs without human intervention.
- When we don’t want to execute a program in normal working hours. In such a case it can be executed at a more convenient time other than the normal working hours.