BMC Control-M 7: A Journey from Traditional Batch Scheduling to Workload Automation

Automating batch processing

As the modern computing batch processing is far more complicated than just simply feeding punched cards in sequence into the mainframe as it was in old days, a lot more factors need to be taken into consideration when running batch processing due to its time consuming and task-intensive nature. Batch scheduling tools were born to automate such processing tasks, thus reducing the possibility of human mistake and security concerns.

There were home-grown toolsets developed on the mainframe computers for automating JCL scripts. Modern age distributed computer systems also came with some general ability to automate batch processing tasks. On a Unix or LINUX computer, CRON is a utility provided as part of the operating system ...