Production jobs

Production jobs run IBM® SPSS® Statistics in an automated fashion. The program runs unattended and ends after the last command runs. You can also schedule the production job to run automatically at scheduled times. Production jobs are useful if you often run the same set of time-consuming analyses, such as weekly reports.

You can run production jobs in two different ways:

Interactively. The program runs unattended in a separate session on either your local computer or a remote server. Your local computer must remain on (and connected to the remote server, if applicable) until the job is complete.

In the background on a server. The program runs in a separate session on a remote server. Your local computer does not have to remain on and does not have to remain connected to the remote server. You can disconnect and retrieve the results later.

Note: Running a production job on a remote server requires access to a server that is running IBM SPSS Statistics Server.

Creating and running production jobs

To create and run a production job:

  1. From the menus, choose:

    Utilities > Production Job

  2. Click New to create a new production job.

    or

  3. Select a production job to run or modify from the list. Click Browse to change the directory location for the files that appears in the list.

    Note: Production Facility job files (.spp) created in releases before release 16.0 do not run in release 16.0 or later. A conversion utility is available to convert Windows and Macintosh Production Facility job files to production jobs (.spj). For more information, see the topic Converting Production Facility files.

  4. Specify one or more command syntax files to include in the job. Click the plus sign (+) icon to select command syntax files.
  5. Select the output file name, location, and format.
  6. Click Run to run the production job interactively or in the background on a server.

Default encoding

By default, IBM SPSS Statistics runs in Unicode mode. You can run production jobs in Unicode mode or the current locale encoding. The encoding affects how data and syntax files are read. For more information, see the topic General options.

  • Unicode (UTF-8). The production job runs in Unicode mode. By default, text data files and command syntax files are read as Unicode UTF-8. You can specify a code page encoding for text data files with the ENCODING subcommand on the GET DATA command. You can specify a code page encoding for syntax files with the ENCODING subcommand on the INCLUDE or INSERT command.
    • Local encoding for syntax files. If a syntax file does not contain a UTF-8 byte order mark, read syntax files as the current locale encoding. This setting overrides any ENCODING specification on INCLUDE or INSERT. It also ignores any code page identifier in the file.
  • Local encoding. The production job runs in the current locale encoding. Unless a different encoding is explicitly specified on a command that reads text data (for example, GET DATA), text data files are read in the current locale encoding. Syntax file with a Unicode UTF-8 byte order mark are read as Unicode UTF-8. All other syntax files are read in the current locale encoding.