ERBSCAN / ERBSHOW – More Good News

(Originally posted 2008-07-11.)

I mentioned ERBSCAN and ERBSHOW in this post from January. This is a handy pair of tools for displaying SMF records – most notably the ones produced by RMF. For the uninitiated you type ERBSCAN in ISPF 3.4 against an SMF data set and it pops up a list of SMF records. Typing ERBSHOW followed by the record number formats the record – especially well if it’s one that RMF produced.

And the prior post on ERBSCAN and ERBSHOW talked about the “x” parameter for ERBSHOW that enhances the formatting.

So, I was in Boeblingen for a different purpose this week and took almost 2 hours of the RMF Development team’s valuable time. 🙂 We talked about many things, including “futures”. There was, as usual, a good meeting of minds.

Matthias Gubitz mentioned an enhancement to ERBSCAN that is worth relating. It’s in z/OS Release 9, but it won’t’ve made the headlines…

The list of records that ERBSCAN produces is an ISPF Edit session. So you can do ISPF Edit things like using Find and Exclude All…

In the past I’ve used it to navigate to eg SMF 74-4 with “F ‘074.004’ and to find records cut by a specific SMF ID. So you can imagine what’s displayed affects usability…

Matthias added the following two items:

• For 72-3 (Workload Activity) the Service Class.
• For 74-4 (Coupling Facility Activity) the Coupling Facility name.

You can see that being able to search on these, perhaps going “Exclude All” first, is going to make finding the records you want – to ERBSHOW – much easier.

Well I think it’s going to save me time. 🙂

And the RMF guys mentioned to me that ERBSCAN / ERBSHOW seem to have become popular. I wonder why. 🙂