Author Archives: Martin Packer

(Originally posted 2013-12-13.) Increasingly people are going to want to understand their zIIP usage and do capacity planning for zIIPs. Previously I’ve written about zIIP CPU numbers from the RMF perspective, namely at the WLM Workload and Service Class levels. This post is about taking it down a layer – to the address space levelContinue reading “zIIP Address Space Instrumentation”

(Originally posted 2013-11-08.) Usually a residency ends on the last day. Well doesn’t everything? 🙂 But this one’s been a little unusual in that regard. Straight after the residency came a week in which two of us presented at the GSE UK Annual Conference on aspects of the residency: Dean Harrison presented on Scheduling andContinue reading “Batch Job Cloning Residency – To The Better End”

(Originally posted 2013-10-20.) While writing Creating JSON with DFSORT I realised one statement in particular is difficult to read and maintain. It’s this one: INREC IFTHEN=(WHEN=INIT,BUILD=(SEQNUM,4,BI, C'{"name": "’,NAME,C’","number": "’,NUMBER,C’"}’)), IFTHEN=(WHEN=(1,4,BI,GT,+1),BUILD=(2X,C’,’,5,70)), IFTHEN=(WHEN=(1,4,BI,EQ,+1),BUILD=(2X,5,70)) It’s not the first one that’s become complicated: Increasingly people are realising the power of what you can do with DFSORT – especially ifContinue reading “More Maintainable DFSORT”

(Originally posted 2013-10-18.) This post is yet another spin off from the residency I’m on in Poughkeepsie. I mentioned in We Have Residents! I might do something with JSON (Javascript Object Notation) and indeed I have. But why would a residency on Batch Performance concern itself with JSON (and indeed XML, which I’ve also writtenContinue reading “Creating JSON with DFSORT”

(Originally posted 2013-10-14.) While working through a scenario in our residency it became (briefly) important to be able to preserve sort order on a field. But this field wasn’t sorted in any recognisable way. So the records couldn’t be sorted alphabetically or numerically. In fact they had to be sorted so that this field wasContinue reading “Unusual Sort Fields”

(Originally posted 2013-10-12.) In What I’m Looking Forward To In z/OS 2.1 I mentioned processing VBS (Variable Blocked Spanned) data with REXX. This post describes what I learnt when I used it on our residency z/OS 2.1 system. The most widely-known VBS data is SMF, though the Tivoli Workload Scheduler (TWS) Audit Log is alsoContinue reading “Processing VBS Data With REXX”

(Originally posted 2013-09-16.) If you’re looking for a considered opinion you came to the wrong place. 🙂 Or so anyone reading Down In The Dumps? shortly after reading Enigma And Variations Of A Memory Kind might conclude. It’s possibly a fair cop, possibly not, but it got me thinking… In reality life is a sequenceContinue reading “My Considered Opinion?”

(Originally posted 2013-09-14.) That’s such a horrible pun I must’ve used it before. If so sorry (but not very). 🙂 This post follows on from Enigma And Variations Of A Memory Kind in a way. In that post I mentioned DUMPSRV, in almost a throwaway fashion: I happened to notice the memory usage in SMFContinue reading “Down In The Dumps?”

(Originally posted 2013-09-11.) As I mentioned in We Have Residents! we'll be working with a z/OS 2.1 system in October. In fact I've already logged on to it. I might even get to play with it before the residency starts, depending on current workload – but the priority is to hit the ground running byContinue reading “What I’m Looking Forward To In z/OS 2.1”