Over the years I’ve written emails with data collection requirements dozens of times, with varying degrees of clarity. It would be better, wouldn’t it, to write it once. I don’t think I can get out of the business of writing such emails entirely but here’s a goodly chunk of it. Another thing that struck me is that the value of some types of data has increased enormously... [More]
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z/os
ftp
smf30
rmf
smf
db2
smf101
mq
cics
wlm
batch
dfsort
terse
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First, I’m indebted to Ray Mullins for his help in figuring out how to solve the problems I identified as remaining in Alternate Macro Libraries: A Way To Document Assembler Tables .
Indeed he wrote a very handy blog post of his own:
Wrapping your own macro code around vendor-supplied macros without changing source
This post, to summarise, shows how you can use the OPSYN instruction to create... [More]
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sed
macro
html
dfsort
rexx
assembler
hlasm
outfil
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When I first heard of Flash Express as part of the zEC12 announcement -
some time before announcement - I thought of one use case above all,
and one of particularly poignant resonance with some of my readers: Dump capture amelioration. Then, in the marketing materials, I heard of others.
And the discussions have grown more numerous recently.
So it’s time I expressed (pardon the pun) my... [More]
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memory
dump
z196
dfsort
stgtest
zec12
flash
paging
sysevent
db2
zflash
express
cics
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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 probably be inserted: Don't just post links to the content of others. In that vein I want to... [More]
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stcke
adata
dfsort
dsect
cics
hlasm
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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.)
And I needed Standard Deviation in a real live customer situation. So I set out to "roll my... [More]
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heron
newton-raphson
square_root
babylonian
sqz
arithmetic
ifthen
findrep
sqrt
dfsort
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The CICS Monitor Trace SMF Record (Type 110) has got to be one of the most complicated SMF records in existence - and for good reason. Which is precisely why I'm not going to attempt to process the raw records in my code. (And why PMCICS doesn't support releases after a certain point.) But the "and for good reason" hints at the fact I think this is a tremendously valuable type of... [More]
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dfhmndup
dfsort
dictionary
rmf
dfh$mols
cicspa
mct
cics
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Now with free map , this is the concluding part of a four part series on batch parallelisation, with especial focus on cloning. In previous parts I discussed: Motivation Classification Issues This part wraps up with thoughts on implementation. I'm going to break it down into: Analysis Making Changes Monitoring While there probably are iterations of this, this is the essential 1-2-3 sequence within... [More]
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vsamlsr
db2
startrec
batchpipes
endrec
vsam
outfil
dfsort
nsr
hiperbatch
parallelism
batch
vsamnsr
tws
save
pipes
lsr
jcl
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Maybe you've all heard of BPXWUNIX. Maybe it's just me that hasn't. Hence the question mark in the title. Seriously, I doubt this REXX function is as widely known about as it should be. And this post hopes to illustrate a little of its value. Suppose you're writing a REXX program with a stem variable in it. Suppose you want to sort the strings in the stem variable: You might write your own... [More]
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bpxwunix
vb
stdin
sort
dfsort
z/os_unix
stdout
vbs
z/os
stderr
smf
rexx
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I can't believe it's been almost a week since I wrote Batch Capacity Planning, Part 1 - CPU . Where did the time go? Re-reading it I'm struck by the overwhelming theme of Batch's unpredictability and lumpiness. This is true of memory, as well, but to a much lesser degree. Why to a lesser degree? Well, in most systems I look at the memory usage is mostly fairly constant and dominated by big... [More]
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z/os
smf72
dim
parallelism
non-swappable
dfsort
swappable
cics
lsr
memory
db2
smf30
vsam
hipersorting
capacity_planning
ims
smf71
batch
dataspace
rmf
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Frank Yaeger of DFSORT Development suggested I pass this tip along to y'all. It's his solution to a problem set by Brian Peterson of UnitedHealth Group... In z/OS Release 12 two new messages were introduced: IEF032I and IEF033I replace IEF374I and IEF376I. The older messages were single-line step- and job-end messages. The new ones are their multiple-line analogues: IEF032I is 3 lines and... [More]
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ief032i
outfil
z/os
ief376i
when=group
parse
ief033i
ifthen
dfsort
messages
ief374i
pipeline
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As you probably know Hardware Data Compression has been supported by MVS
and IBM mainframes for around 20 years. In several recent batch studies
I've conducted it's been evident in a widespread way. (In
this post I'm not talking about DB2 compression of either flavour or
VSAM compression - though some of the information here applies to these
functions as well.) It's not as
simple... [More]
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pipes
striping
dfsort
vsam
qsam
compression
cpu
smf
smf14
smf64
dfsms/mvs
z/os
smf15
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Following on from The Best Sort Is The One You Don't Do here's another reason for eliminating sorts. I think it's worth a post in its own right. (In this post, again, I'm talking about resequencing passes over data - not copying or merging.) With a sort it's possible the last record read in might be the first record written out. So you can never overlap input and output phases. (There might... [More]
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dataflow
sort
batchpipes/mvs
dfsort
pipes
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Have you ever had the suspicion a sort was unnecessary in your batch? I bet you have. In recent Batch Performance studies I've had the suspicion that many of the sorts are unnecessary: Either they should be merges or not done at all. But how do you prove it? But first, what do I mean by a sort not needing to be done at all? Clearly if the data is reformatted then something has to be done to... [More]
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batchpipes/mvs
dataflow
dfsort
pipes
merge
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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). XSLT looks complex - particularly if recursion does your head in. Thought 2 I'll deal with in a... [More]
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xml
xslt
document()
saxon
dfsort
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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 find valuable. First, here's the SORTIN DD JCL statement. It's not like a regular sequential file... [More]
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sff
when=init
dfsort
parse
z/os
icetool
xalan
saxon
symbols
csv
xslt
xml
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