Author Archives: Martin Packer

(Originally posted 2014-09-08.) Some technologies show up “in the field” very soon after they’re announced and shipped. Others take a little longer. Back in 2009[1] I blogged about one technology – DFSORT JOINKEYS. For this post to make much sense you’ll probably want to read that post first. Here it is: DFSORT Does JOIN. DaveContinue reading “DFSORT JOINKEYS Instrumentation – A Practical Example”

(Originally posted 2014-08-18.) I’m pleased to be presenting three sessions at UK GSE Annual Conference, Tuesday 4th and Wednesday 5th November in Whittlebury Hall. Two are on the zCMPA (Performance and Capacity or “UKCMG”) track: Life and Times of an Address Space (Tuesday) zIIP Capacity Planning (Wednesday) I’ve written about these extensively. Obviously they’re evolvedContinue reading “Workload Manager And DB2 Presentation Abstract”

(Originally posted 2014-06-03.) Sitting in Dave Gorman’s Broker V9 presentation in Budapest it struck me it would be a useful exercise to apply the “Systems Investigation” techniques I write about to Broker running on z/OS. So let’s see how far we can get with SMF 30 Interval records, in the vein of Life And TimesContinue reading “Broker And SMF 30”

(Originally posted 2014-05-21.) In Budapest at the European System z Technical University I presented three topics: zIIP Capacity Planning (twice) Life And Times Of An Address Space Parallel Batch Performance Considerations The links take you to the Slideshare uploads of these presentations. The first two of these are updated for this conference and I’ve overwrittenContinue reading “System z Technical University, Budapest 12-16 May 2014, Slides”

(Originally posted 2014-05-18.) “Mobile” appears to be “flavour of the month” right now, and this week at System z Technical University it has certainly been a topic in evidence, whether it’s discussions in the breaks, sessions on software pricing, or sessions on Mobile-enabling technology. I don’t intend in this post to discuss any of these.Continue reading “And Just Complain”

(Originally posted 2014-05-17.) You can blame the weather for this post. 🙂 I’m writing it on a flight above thick cloud[1] on my way to Munich and then to Budapest for this year’s European System z Technical University. I like to see the complete picture when I’m examining systems: It makes getting it right soContinue reading “Hints Of Other Systems”

(Originally posted 2014-05-03.) Sometimes I’m in the mood to carefully peck at the text and sometimes I’m in the mood to just “splurge write”. And sometimes a bit of both. This post is a case in point: I just want to get the words out as fast as I can. Now, I do quite aContinue reading “Appening 4 – SwiftKey on iOS”

(Originally posted 2014-05-02.) If you have a large mainframe estate it can be difficult to keep track of when the various moving parts start and stop. For example, if you’re a Performance person it’s quite likely nobody bothered to tell you when the systems were IPL’ed. You might well know what the regime for startingContinue reading “Once Upon A Restart”

(Originally posted 2014-05-01.) Over a year ago I wrote about a couple of iOS applications I was enjoying using.[1] And now it’s time to write about a third, as it’s part of my authoring toolkit. In Recent Conference Presentations I showed off my then new writing rig: Byword (with MultiMarkDown) and my iPad Mini withContinue reading “Appening 3 – Editorial on iOS”

(Originally posted 2014-04-30.) I’ve been meaning to write about MEMLIMIT and its importance for some time.[1] But it’s a moving target. So either there’s no good time to talk about it or lots of good times. 🙂 So let me discuss it now and then again later as necessary.[2] So timing a post on MEMLIMITContinue reading “Setting MEMLIMIT”