Author Archives: Martin Packer

(Originally posted 2009-11-22.) Our channel reporting has consisted forever of a single chart. Before I tell you what the chart looked like I’ll hazard that your channel reporting was about as bad. 🙂 See, it’s not something people tend to put much effort into. Our one-chart report basically listed the top channels, from the perspectiveContinue reading “Channel Performance Reporting”

(Originally posted 2009-11-09.) There’s a pattern I’ve seen over a number of test Parallel Sysplex environments over the past few years, a couple of them in situations this year: It’s not much use drawing performance inferences from test environments if they’re not set up properly for performance tests. Sounds obvious, doesn’t it? There are twoContinue reading “A Few Thoughts On Parallel Sysplex Test Environments”

(Originally posted 2009-11-08.) I’ve just submitted a set of slides to Slideshare. They’re not mine, they’re not new, they’re not even in a modern format. But they are a very good presentation worth preserving… In 1993 Curt Cotner presented a set of slides on the new DDF Inactive Thread support in Version 3 of DB2.Continue reading “DDF Performance – Version 3 – but still highly relevant”

(Originally posted 2009-11-08.) Apologies for being away. For a while I couldn’t get the blog to operate – as an author. And then I gave up trying. 😦 Count this as a "testing 1-2-3" post but also as notice I intend to back with more (hopefully useful) content soon. MUCH has happened in the "intermission".Continue reading “Hello World Again!”

(Originally posted 2009-05-07.) I’m reporting what I’m learning (or I think is significant) in conference sessions on Twitter. My Id is “MartinPacker” and I’m using the Hashtag “#zOS09” to tag my posts. Feel free to follow along. In principle you don’t even need to sign up to Twitter to do this. It seems more immediateContinue reading “European System z Tech Conference – Brussels 4-8 May 2009”

(Originally posted 2009-04-26.) Here’s another “For Beginners” post to encourage people to just leap in and try it… Javascript is a language popularly used for such things as web pages with some programming in them (and that includes frameworks like dojo), building Firefox extensions, and the Adobe AIR (desktop) runtime. As it happens I’m prettyContinue reading “Javascript on z/OS For Beginners – Getting It To Run”

(Originally posted 2009-04-25.) In this post (and any others in a similar vein) I'm going to be displaying a great deal of ignorance – but I think I'm doing it in a good cause. I know a fair amount about things like Java, XML and C++ – but NOT on z/OS. So I'm determined toContinue reading “z/OS Unix System Services For Beginners – Java Hello World”

(Originally posted 2009-04-25.) Back in z/OS R.9 RMF Parallel Sysplex New Fields (in 2007) I mentioned a new field: R742MJOB (XCF Member Job Name.) At the time I had no real customer data so I could only espouse the HOPE that this field would be useful. (When I asked for it to be added toContinue reading “DB2 Data Sharing and XCF Job Name”

(Originally posted 2009-04-10.) To whoever (In the USA I think) Googled “what is REMOVECC” and got to this blog let me give you my thoughts on the matter. (And yes I know, it being a search, you might never come back to read this.) To understand REMOVECC you have to understand that the “CC” refersContinue reading “What is REMOVECC?”

(Originally posted 2009-04-10.) For whoever got to my blog with this Google search here’s how you sort data without a header: First you need to be using z/OS DFSORT Release 10 or to have applied the PTFs for UK90013 (July 2008). Second, the vehicle for doing this is ICETOOL rather than DFSORT itself. Use theContinue reading “DFSORT Sorting Without Sorting Header / Trailer Lines”