Selecting the working plan

When you monitor the processing of your scheduling activities, you can choose the plan you want to work with. This plan is called the active plan.

There are several ways of defining the active plan. By default, the active plan is the default plan, which is associated to the engine connection. However, you can select a different plan and define it as active in the following ways:

Associating a plan to the task: Every time the task is run, it is run using the specified plan. Usually this setting is useful if you want to run multiple queries at the same time against different plans. To run the task on a different plan, you must either change this selection or use a temporary plan selection that lasts only until the current session expires. This plan selection takes precedence over all other selections and is the first to be used. It is made during the task creation when specifying the engine connection in the Enter Task Information panel.
Dynamically defining a temporary plan: You can set a temporary plan selection. This plan is used as the active plan for the current session only. All tasks and engines that have been set to use the active plan will use the currently defined plan. This plan selection is valid unless a different plan is defined as the active plan in the Enter Task Information panel.
Associating a plan to an engine: If none of the above settings are specified, tasks are run against the plan associated to the engine. By default, this plan and the active plan are the same.

Associating a plan to the task

To associate a plan to a task, perform the following steps:

In the navigation bar, click System Status and Health > All Configured Tasks > New.
In the All Configured Tasks panel, select the type of task you want to create and click Next.
In the Enter Task Information panel, select a distributed engine as the scheduler engine where you want to run the task. If you select Ask when needed, you cannot perform the next steps.
Click Select to specify the plan that you want to associate to this task. Unless you change this selection, this task is always run against this plan.
Alternatively, click Use Active Plan, if you want this task to run using the plan that is set as the active plan in the plan list panel.
In the Select Plan panel, select the plan that you want to associate to this task and click OK to return to the Enter Task Information panel.
If you do not select any plan, the task uses the plan set as active. You can change the active plan by following the procedure described in Dynamically defining a temporary plan.

Dynamically defining a temporary plan

From the Manage Available Plans entry in the navigation toolbar, you can specify some filtering criteria to retrieve a list of plans.

Regardless of whether you are the owner of the engine connection or if it is only shared with you, you can select a plan from the list to define it as the active plan for the current session.

Follow these steps to define a filter and run a query to create a list of available plans:

From the navigation toolbar, click Planning > Workload Forecast > Manage Available Plans.
In the Manage Available Plans panel:
1. Under Select an Engine, select the engine where you want to list the plans.
2. Under Select Plan Type, click the corresponding check box to select the type of plan you want to list. Selections are mutually exclusive. By default, all available plans are listed.
3. Under Select Plan Name, specify the name of the file containing the plan you want to search. You can use wildcard characters.
4. Click Display Plans List to generate a list of plans.
From the displayed list, select a plan and click Set as active to set it as a temporary plan that remains valid until the current session expires or you set another active plan.

Only for the current session, the plan selection made in this panel overrides the plan selection specified in the engine connection properties panel. However, it does not override the plan selection specified during the task definition.

Associating a plan to an engine

To associate a plan to an engine, perform the following steps:

From the navigation bar, click System Configuration > Manage Engines.
In the Manage Engines panel, select an engine and click Connection Properties.
Under the Plans section, click Select to view a list of the available plans.
Choose a plan from the list and click OK. This setting is overridden by the plan selection made in the Enter Task Information panel or, if not available, by the selection made in the List Available Plans panel.