Managing space with COMPRESS, CONSOLIDATE, DEFRAG, and RELEASE

DFSMSdss provides features which consolidate free space on volumes, compress partitioned data sets, release unused data set space and combine data sets extents.

To help prevent out-of-space abends on new allocations you can use:

The DFSMSdss COMPRESS command to compress partitioned data sets by consolidating unused space at the end of the data set.
The DFSMSdss CONSOLIDATE command to combine as many extents of a data set into as few contiguous extents as possible .
The DFSMSdss DEFRAG command to consolidate free space on a volume.
The DFSMSdss RELEASE command to free unused space for use by other data sets within sequential, partitioned, and extended-format VSAM data sets.