Well, the new gig is going alright. I'm not doing Java development (yet) because I decided to take the user stories that involved the database side of the house. That means lots of DDL in addition to the usual DML, something I've done relatively little of in the past. It has also given me a chance to become more proficient at PL/SQL. Good thing I took that Oracle PL/SQL class not long ago.
We have a few stored procs we're going to run once daily. I decided that I hate running cron jobs that do nothing but call Oracle stored procedures, and came across dbms_job. I say "came across" only because the DBA knew about them. The dbms_job package is strangely omitted from every Oracle book I own, including "Oracle 9i: The Complete Reference" from Oracle Press.
Anyway, I need to find out if there is any real drawback to using a dbms_job vs cron. The only thing that concerns me is error handling, but the inserts and updates are not what I would call "critical" and can always be run by hand if something should go wrong.
