A Good Way To Kick Off 2013 – Two UKCMG Conference Abstracts

(Originally posted 2013-01-13.)

First, a belated Happy New Year! to everyone. It’s been a busy past few weeks, not least because of the customer situation I’m working on.

But, to kick off 2013 here are the two conference abstracts I submitted for the UKCMG Annual Conference. No pressure, guys. 🙂

Time For DIME

In recent years memory has become cheaper, or certainly more plentiful. This enables us to do new things, or old things faster and better.

I believe it is indeed Time For DIME (Data In Memory Exploitation). But we’ve been here before – in the late 1980’s. Much has changed but the basic concepts haven’t. So this presentation reminds us of "the way we were" but brings things right up to date. It covers why you’d want to run a DIME project and how to go about it: It covers both the project phases and technical aspects, preparing you to make a quick start on realising the benefits of DIME.

While the main example presented here is DB2, the presentation also discusses Coupling Facility memory exploitation, as well as a number of other examples.

The Life And Times Of An Address Space

A typical z/OS system has a wide variety of address spaces. So much so that managing their performance can be difficult.

This presentation prepares you to handle this diversity, discussing what’s common to all and what’s different. Centred around SMF Type 30 records, it guides you in deciding when to rely on common instrumentation, and when to go to more specific data, such as CICS instrumentation or data set records.

Personally I find it very difficult to write abstracts – particularly as you end up trying to write them before you write the actual presentation. So the finished result can be different. But then every time anyone ever gives a presentation it turns out at least a little different.

As for the UKCMG Annual Conference, this is an event I’ve been proud to present at most years in the last 20. It’s always been a great crowd and a good opportunity to catch up with what people are doing. This time it’s in London at the CBI, instead of being out in the country. I don’t know how much difference that will make. Come and join us if you can. Here’s the link: UKCMG Annual Conference, London, May 14-15, 2013

And a final thought: I write about what I want to write about (and what I think is important). If you have ideas of what I should be presenting on and writing on do let me know.