Problem solved

Two blog entries in one day. I must be trying to make up for yesterday.

I just spent a couple of hours trying to solve this problem, and I think I finally did.

I had a session with a $$LASTRUN date which should receive the sessstarttime of the mapping and then set that when the session completes so that it knows where to pick up from the previous run.

Except it wasn't working. When I ran the session, the mapping variable ended up with the same exact value as it had started with. Which frustrated me, because I have other jobs that do the exact same thing and they do work. So, I ended up comparing this mapping (which wasn't working) and one that was and found this:

The mapping which worked had a default mapping variable value of '2009-04-17 12:00:00'.

And the default mapping variable value of the one not working was '04/17/2009 12:00:00'.

Note the ever-so-subtle difference.

Now, why this caused the mapping variable not to get assigned the correct value, I'll never know.

But keep this tip in your back pocket in case you run into problems with mappings behaving in this way.