Category Archives: Uncategorized

(Originally posted 2012-09-29.) Do you see what I did there? 🙂 On March 10th I published the slides to “I Know What You Did Last Summer” on Slideshare. Since then I’ve given the presentation thrice and in the process got to know it a little. (Yes I really do think creations take on a lifeContinue reading “I Know What You Did THIS Summer”

(Originally posted 2012-09-24.) This was originally going to be a different post about VSAM’s SMF 64 record, based on a customer situation. But it’s morphed into something else: A round up of "recent" enhancements to the SMF 64 record. "Recent" is a nice euphemism: Some of these enhancements are 15 years old. 🙂 But let’sContinue reading “Some Things You Might Not Know About VSAM SMF Type 64 Records”

(Originally posted 2012-09-19.) Prompted by Troy Coleman’s article zEC12 and zIIP Processors I thought I’d write about how I see the future for zAAPs. First, his article does a good job of covering the area. So I recommend you read it. Troy mentions the “zAAP on zIIP” function – which allows zAAP-eligible work to runContinue reading “Time To Move From zAAPs to zIIPs?”

(Originally posted 2012-09-18.) I’ve written extensively in the past about what you can glean about batch suites from SMF, most notably SMF Type 30. While I don’t believe SMF alone can give you the full dependency network (complete with validation) I’ve just added some analysis to my code that gets me a little closer. AsContinue reading “Games You Can Play With Timestamps”

(Originally posted 2012-09-13.) This post is about unusual ways of using the SMF 30 Usage Data information, some of which you’re certain to want if you’re managing z/OS systems’ performance. A long time ago I noticed character strings in SMF 30 records that looked like product names. (As is my wont I was looking atContinue reading “Another Usage Of Usage Information”

(Originally posted 2012-09-06.) I hope you like my new blog banner – in honour of the new zEnterprise EC12. We actually announced the zEC12 (for short) the day I returned from vacation. Great planning, IBM! 🙂 It’s taken me a while to catch up – and changing the banner was an important step. 🙂 I’veContinue reading “New Blog Banner – In Honour Of The New zEnterprise EC12 (zEC12)”

(Originally posted 2012-08-04.) I’m not a capacity planner but I play one on TV1 sometimes. A customer asked me about the subject of zAAP Capacity Planning so I thought I’d post a few thoughts here. (Almost everything I say here is equally true of a zIIP.) The main point is I don’t think it terriblyContinue reading “zIIP / zAAP Capacity Planning”

(Originally posted 2012-07-10.) I can tell when a CICS region came up – without looking at CICS-specific instrumentation. What’s more I can repeat the "trick" for any of MQ, DB2, IMS, etc – and so can you. I’ve just started work on a new piece of reporting. I’ll call it "raddrspc" as that’s the nameContinue reading “The Low Down on Up Time”

(Originally posted 2012-07-07.) It’s said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. In this Social Media age I’d say indirection comes a pretty close second. Indeed there’s a nice term for it: "link love". Standard advice is not to just post links to the content of others. In reality the word "just" should probablyContinue reading “DSECTs To DFSORT Symbols”

(Originally posted 2012-07-02.) DFSORT’s Arithmetic operators can do many things but the one thing they can’t do is take the square root of a number. You might think that’s minor but it means you can’t calculate a Standard Deviation. (Variance is fine but dimensionally not so nice when used in conjunction with the Mean.) AndContinue reading “Square Roots In DFSORT”