Validating a job

You can check that a job or job invocation will run successfully by validating it.

About this task

Jobs should be validated before running them for the first time, or after making any significant changes to job parameters.

When a server job is validated, the following checks are made without actually extracting, converting, or writing data:

Connections are made to the data sources or data warehouse.
SQL SELECT statements are prepared.
Files are opened. Intermediate files in Hashed File, UniVerse, or ODBC stages that use the local data source are created, if they do not already exist.

When a parallel job is validated, the job is run in `check only' mode so data is not affected.

Select the job or job invocation you want to validate in the Job Status view.
Choose Job > Validate... . The Job Run Options dialog box appears. See Setting Job Options.
Fill in the job parameters as required.
Click Validate. Click OK to acknowledge the message. The job is validated and the job's status is updated to Running.
Note: It might take some time for the job status to be updated, depending on the load on the engine tier host and the refresh rate for the client.

Once validation is complete, the updated job's status displays one of these status messages:

Validated OK. You can now schedule or run the job.
Failed validation. You need to view the job log file for details of where the validation failed. For more details, see "The Job Log File."

If you want to monitor the validation in progress, you can use a Monitor window. For more information, see "Monitoring Jobs."