Author Archives: Martin Packer

(Originally posted 2016-06-11.) Pardon the bad pun. Perhaps I should’ve written “Engine-ering” but where exactly do you put the dash?[1] There were hints on this topic in Born With A Measuring Spoon In Its Mouth but the real motivation came from a z196 customer without Hiperdispatch enabled. But what on earth am I on about?Continue reading “Engineering”

(Originally posted 2016-06-05.) SMT really was born with a measuring spoon in its mouth.[1] Let me rewind a few years… So, when SMT (Simultaneous Multithreading) was being designed I was privileged to be on the periphery of discussions about how to instrument SMT. Things like CPU Utilisation get a little wierd in the SMT case,Continue reading “Born With A Measuring Spoon In Its Mouth”

(Originally posted 2016-06-04.) Episode 4 was, of course, our fifth podcast episode. 🙂 I had a lot of fun making the intro – with Audacity. I’m not sure if it’s “lost souls” or “tuning in”. It was meant to be the latter but the former is also good. Below are the show notes. The seriesContinue reading “Mainframe Performance Topics Podcast Episode 4 “The Road To Munich””

(Originally posted 2016-05-29.) You probably don’t have the same problem I do, namely not having access to SMF data from all the systems in your mainframe estate. You’ll recognise that as a provocative statement if ever there was one; For all sorts of reasons not every system’s RMF SMF is collected. Most notably, test systemsContinue reading “Shared Coupling Facility CPU And DYNDISP”

(Originally posted 2016-05-24.) On Twitter I joked ‘refactoring’ is ‘taking perfectly well working code and risking breaking it’. This post describes one such exercise. tl;dr: It was well worth it! In DFSORT Tables I wrote about a technique to create tables (or grids) using IFTHEN. It’s been a maintenance headache to the extent that theContinue reading “Refactoring ISPF File Tailoring And DFSORT”

(Originally posted 2016-05-19.) As I’ve indicated elsewhere we use iThoughts for outlining our podcast episodes (and use it to track completion). I’ve developed quite a nice technique for iThoughtsX (the macOS flavour), which I’ll share with you. This is in case you’re inclined to play with newer toys. 🙂 Consider the following fragment of anContinue reading “iThoughts The Legend”

(Originally posted 2016-05-16.) Already this year I’ve posted thrice on DDF: DB2 DDF Transaction Rates Without Tears DDF Batch DDF Counts It’s clearly something that’s important to me right now. 🙂 So this post is to mention I’m putting the finishing touches to a new presentation (the third of the year so far). I’m givingContinue reading “More Fun With DDF”

(Originally posted 2016-05-07.) You probably wonder why I post to my blog echoing our podcast episodes. There are two reasons: Yes, it alerts more people to our podcast series. Well duh. 🙂 It gives me a chance to inject something more personal about the episode. So in the latter spirit I’d say the highlight forContinue reading “Mainframe Performance Topics Podcast Episode 3 “Getting Better””

(Originally posted 2016-05-02.) Some of my blog posts revolve around a single SMF field, or maybe a couple. This post is one of those. If I look at my customers’ mainframe estates [1], especially the DB2 portion of them, they’re getting more complex by the year. In particular, quite a few customers are in theContinue reading “DB2 DDF Transaction Rates Without Tears”

(Originally posted 2016-05-01.) In Episode 1 of MPT Podcast we discussed Markdown and Marna asked me if it could be run on z/OS. My answer was “you could try a Python Markdown processor via Jython”.[1] Then, on IBM-MAIN, Dave Griffiths suggested using one of the Java Markdown processors, instead of Jython. So I got toContinue reading “Java Markdown Processing On z/OS”