Author Archives: Martin Packer

(Originally posted 2011-06-21.) Reading Now Your Embarrassing/Job-Threatening Facebook Photos Could Haunt You For Seven Years I think they’ve missed a point or two. Points which may be incidental to the thrust of the article but nonetheless are important ones: Who’s to say what’s embarrassing or job-threatening? Some things are obvious: In the post they talkContinue reading “A Comment on “Now Your Embarrassing/Job-Threatening Facebook Photos Could Haunt You For Seven Years””

(Originally posted 2011-06-12.) Here’s the first-pass abstract slide for "I Know What You Did Last Summer". I’d be interested in your thoughts on it… What’s The Point Of This Presentation? So, it’s got a "tongue-in-cheek" title but what’s it all about? I think one of the least appreciated aspects of z/OS and its middleware isContinue reading “I Know What You Did Last Summer – Abstract”

(Originally posted 2011-05-29.) At one level Performance and Capacity Management and Systems Investigation are clearly linked: They share the same data. Or much of it at least. But I think they’re linked in another way, too. Over the past few years I’ve gradually shifted emphasis towards Systems Investigation. But this has only been a slightContinue reading “Capacity, Performance and Systems Investigation”

(Originally posted 2011-05-24.) When tuning DB2 batch it’s important to know which SMF 101 Accounting Trace record corresponds to which job step. A few years ago I wrote code to do this. It works fine for all z/OS DB2 Batch except that originated by IMS. Here’s how it works: Find all the Type 30 Step-EndContinue reading “Finding The DB2 Accounting Trace Records For an IMS Batch Job Step”

(Originally posted 2011-05-22.) While I was putting together the original three posts in this series a number of thoughts struck me, amongst which two really cried out for further investigation: I don't know how your XML data arrives on z/OS but quite a lot of scenarios don't have the data all as one document (file).Continue reading “XML, XSLT and DFSORT, Part Three – Multiple XML Input Files”

(Originally posted 2011-05-20.) I’ve done a little analysis of hits on recent blog posts. I wonder what you make of it: Looking at this pie chart slices start at the top and go anticlockwise. Reading the legend is from latest to oldest, left to right, wrapping appropriately. While the blog is called "Mainframe Performance Topics"Continue reading “Who Are You And What Have You Done With My Readers? :-)”

(Originally posted 2011-05-20.) Following on from this post and this one, this post discusses the DFSORT piece. The DFSORT code in this post parses the Comma-Separated Variable (CSV) file produced by XSLT processing. In this simple example it merely produces a flat file report, but the post has a few additional details you might findContinue reading “XML, XSLT and DFSORT, Part Two – DFSORT”

(Originally posted 2011-05-14.) This is the second part of a (currently) three-part series on processing XML data with DFSORT, given a little help from standard XML processing tools. The first part – which you should read before reading on – is here. To recap, getting XML data into DFSORT is a two stage process: FlattenContinue reading “XML, XSLT and DFSORT, Part One – Creating A Flat File With XSLT”

(Originally posted 2011-05-11.) In the distant past I’ve written about using DFSORT to parse XML. This post (and two follow-on posts) will describe an experiment to make such processing much more robust. In this post I’ll talk about what the problem I’m trying to solve is. And why. And a brief outline of my solution.Continue reading “XML, XSLT and DFSORT, Part Zero – Overview”

(Originally posted 2011–05–09.) I think people know better than to ask me for a trip report to a conference I’ve attended. They’ll get what I think is important – and their priorities are probably different. So here is that trip report anyway… 🙂 You’ll probably have gathered by now I’m for a “for the journey”Continue reading “Vienna Conference – A Trip Report”