note mpeppler Indeed. I've (relatively) recently joined an "enterprise" (large bank), and the code they've written to handle a lot of batch jobs of various types is pretty hairy (think thousands of lines of ksh). They use things like CA-Unicenter to manage all these jobs (scheduling) on a collection of machines with 50 or so production database instances, but the whole setup is what we call in French "une using à gaz" - i.e. you have pipes going every which way, with various pieces interconnected in various ways, and where only a few people really understand what the dependencies are between the various bits...<p> Me, I just manage their Sybase databases... :-)<p> Michael 504043 504333