Database Software

I currently have a half dozen cron jobs that kick off different batches of processing. Originally, these were generally a sequence of C programs that did different operations (fetch student info from student record system and load into IdM system, process directory changes, etc). Over the years, most of the program logic has been rewritten as PL/SQL packages and the cron jobs basically drop into SQL*PLUS and do things like:

prompt "Do Spbpers delta"
execute simon.employee_maint.Spbpers_Delta;
commit;
prompt "Do People.Update_From_Employees"
execute simon.People_Maint.Update_From_Employees;
commit;
prompt "Do SGBSTDN_Full"
execute Simon.Bstudent_Maint.Sgbstdn_Full;
commit;
prompt "Do SPRIDEN_Full (Student)"
execute Simon.Bstudent_Maint.Spriden_Full;

These procedures generally connect to other Oracle databases and get or push data around, and are hitting a number of different databases. The biggest of these scripts has 45 execute statements in it. (This script started in 1992.....)

Anyway, we are getting some issues with and it is time to clean things up. This is my first foray into Scheduler and I am hoping to get some philosophical guidance on how best I should restructure things. One obvious thing, is to break up the big script into a couple of smaller ones. In some cases, order matters and in other, it doesn't - although I would prefer not to have several jobs hitting the admin system at the same time.

I have been playing a bit with the scheduler, mostly via the EM web interface, and have come up with a few questions - some pretty specific, others more stylistic.

1) Procedures as jobs - it seemed to want stand alone procedures, and NOT procedures that were part of a package. True?

2) How fine grained should I make the steps in a chain? For example, I call 5 procedures in the same package (student_maint), each to to some specific aspect of the processing (each represents a different source table). Should I create 5 programs, and make them 5 steps in the chain, or just have 5 calls in a PL/SQL block in one program?

3) I don't care what order these 5 run in, but I don't want more than one running at once - thoughts on approaches to this?

4) I will on occasion want to turn off sets of these tasks (like when the remote system is going to be down for an upgrade) - how best to structure things to make this easy to do (and how do I do this?)

The Scheduler system seems to be a very rich and flexible environment, with a lot more options and features than I need, but I feel I should do more than just scheduling a single program with 45 procedure calls in it....