Category Archives: Uncategorized

(Originally posted 2012-02-13.) Way back in April of last year I started to talk about a presentation I hoped to write: "I Know What You Did Last Summer" and I showed a brain dump of ideas. Then in June I blogged the abstract (complete with a revision in a subsequent comment). Despite the occasional commentContinue reading “I Know What You Did Last Summer – Some Structure At Last”

(Originally posted 2012-02-06.) I was lucky enough to be in Silicon Valley Lab for DB2 BootCamp last week. There I ran into a DB2 developer I’ve worked very successfully with in the past – John Tobler. (He’s the guy I look to for questions and issues with DB2 SMF data.) We had a good discussionContinue reading “Would You Like More WLM Information In DB2 Accounting Trace – And How Would You Use It?”

(Originally posted 2012-01-28.) Well, some of us have. 🙂 Well before we announced zEnterprise I thought it would be rolled out and adopted in a similar manner to Parallel Sysplex (and to many other technologies – whether mainframe or otherwise). Reading zEnterprise Use Cases Start Rolling In I still think I’m right. And I willContinue reading “Haven’t We Been Here Before?”

(Originally posted 2012-01-23.) You might consider it showing off if I mention I got a Kindle for Xmas. Feel free to. 🙂 But I’d like to share my experience with you – as you might find it useful anyway. First, I really like the Kindle as it stands. Mine is a Keyboard 3G one. IContinue reading “A Better Calibre of Kindling”

(Originally posted 2012-01-20.) A couple of items from the world of music caught my attention recently – and there’s some commonality between them: According to Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters’ blog post: Hey everybody, Dave here’ “From day one, the idea for this record was to make something completely simple and honest, to capture thatContinue reading “Rough And Ready?”

(Originally posted 2011-12-18.) JVM-based languages have an interesting property for z/OS programmers: They are zAAP-eligible. As we all know zAAP Eligibility brings a number of benefits – including the licence charge benefits and the ability to run on a full-speed processor even when your general-purpose processors are subcapacity ones. (I’ll briefly mention zAAP-on-zIIP here forContinue reading “Java’s Not The Only JVM-Based Language”

(Originally posted 2011-12-16.) This is the post I was going to write before the discussion that led to CICS VSAM Buffering arose. It’s about getting more insight into how WLM is set up and performing than RMF Workload Activity Report data alone allows. I recognise some of this can be done with the WLM policyContinue reading “What’s In A Name?”

(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”