Category Archives: Uncategorized

(Originally posted 2011-12-16.) Four score and seven years ago (or so it seems) 🙂 the Washington Systems Center published a set of mainframe Data-In-Memory studies. These were conducted by performance teams in various IBM labs and were quite instructive and inspiring. I wish I could find the form number (and a fortiori a PDF version)Continue reading “CICS VSAM Buffering”

(Originally posted 2011-12-12.) As I said in this post I recently came across the need to handle Unicode when processing DB2 Accounting Trace (SMF 101). I was astonished not to have run into it before in all my many sets of customer data. So I had two things to do: Understand the circumstances under whichContinue reading “DB2 Accounting Trace And Unicode”

(Originally posted 2011-12-09.) In my experience there are two kinds of CICS installations: Those that take CICS down at night – to run the Batch – and those that don’t. There is a loose correlation between what the data manager is and which approach is taken: VSAM-based CICS applications tend to be less 24×7 thanContinue reading “CICS and Batch”

(Originally posted 2011-12-05.) I don’t know how many years it’s been since DB2 Version 8 was shipped but I’ve FINALLY added support for some really useful statistics that became available with that release. As so often happens I was caused to open up my code because of some customer data that exposed a problem inContinue reading “DB2 Package-Level Statistics and Batch Tuning”

(Originally posted 2011-11-20.) The very first computer game I ever played was called Rhino and it ran on a Commodore PET. The school had been lent one for a fortnight. (I don’t know why as we didn’t go on to buy any, instead getting a single RML 380Z.) Imagine a character-grid screen where the rhino’sContinue reading “Rhino’s”

(Originally posted 2011-11-04.) I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before in this blog but Tivoli Workload Scheduler (TWS) has a nice "WLM Integration" feature. With it TWS can change the Service Class a job runs in – before submission. The main purpose of this is to elevate Critical Path work. We wrote about this inContinue reading “Tivoli Workload Scheduler and Workload Manager Service Classes”

(Originally posted 2011-10-25.) One of the nice enhancements in z/OS Release 13 JES2 was the support for SYSIN in a JCL procedure. (See here for the announcement letter.) I have a personal example of where it would’ve been handy. You probably have your own. We used to distribute sample JCL to use DB2 DSNTIAUL toContinue reading “SYSIN In A Proc – New With z/OS Release 13 JES2”

(Originally posted 2011-10-20.) I mentioned APAR OA21140 before – here. It’s quite an old APAR and so it will (in all likelihood) be on your systems. I’d like to draw your attention to a subtle 1-byte field in the SMF 74 Subtype 4 (Coupling Facility Activity) record: R744FLPN. It’s the partition number for the couplingContinue reading “A Small Step For RMF, A Giant Leap For Self-Documenting Systems”

(Originally posted 2011-10-17.) I’ve been looking for an excuse to reference the excellent B52’s Channel Z ever since we started talking about "z". And this is, I think, a good one. 🙂 (Notice BTW the URL in the previous paragraph makes it clear SING365.com (should be "SING360" 🙂 ) is using Domino.) So, back toContinue reading ““Channel Z’s All Static All Day Forever” – IRD and Hiperdispatch”

(Originally posted 2011-10-14.) As mentioned here, I recently participated in a residency in Poughkeepsie. Our task was to write the "Batch Optimization on z/OS" redbook that we hope will get out soon (though I think early next year is the most realistic timescale). These past two weeks I "toured" the redbook in the Nordics: 5Continue reading “Touring The Upcoming Batch Optimization On z/OS Redbook”