How does an Oozie coordinator react on an underlying workflow change?

Question

I have a question about Apache Oozie and more specifically on the CDH distribution.

What happens to a coordinator when the workflow it uses has been modified? For example the workflow now uses an extra parameter which is automatically filled in by a variable. This would in theory not require any changes on the coordinator. Do running coordinators still use the configuration of the initial workflow or do they dynamically adapt to the new one. If they still use the old configuration do I then need to define a new coordinator or is resubmitting the same coordinator enough?

Answer 1

This is how it works: Every submitted coordinator has a fixed set of variables and parameters (config file). The -change option allows you to change the following attributes of the coordinator:

• endtime: the end time of the coordinator job.
• concurrency: the concurrency of the coordinator job.
• pausetime: the pause time of the coordinator job.

Everything with the exception of the Coordinator coordinator name, frequency, start time, end time and timezone can be changed with the -update option. For details see the official documentation:

http://oozie.apache.org/docs/4.3.0/DG_CommandLineTool.html#Updating_coordinator_definition_and_properties

In the config file you are usually pointing to a coordinator file in hdfs which then points to a workflow file in hdfs. If you change either of these in hdfs, the next time the coordinator triggers it will use the new/modified files. The same holds true, for all files that are being used in workflow actions e.g. shell scripts, Jar-files, ...