Using CICS TS autojournaling

CICS® TS supports the automatic journaling (autojournaling) of file control data to a specified general log stream. Parameters specified in the CICS definitions of VSAM files determine whether or not autojournaling is to be performed, and the types of operations (add, read, or others) that are recorded.

IBM® recommends that the log records produced by CICS TS autojournaling must only be used for audit purposes, for the following reasons:
  • When a failure occurs during forward recovery logging, CICS performs certain actions to prevent loss of data, but these actions are not performed when a failure occurs during autojournaling. Therefore it cannot be guaranteed that a VSAM sphere is completely and correctly recovered from log records produced by CICS TS autojournaling.
  • During forward recovery logging, CICS writes specific log records for the VSAM spheres that are eligible for backup-while-open (BWO) processing. These log records are required by CICS VR to perform a proper restore and forward recovery of VSAM spheres from BWO backups. CICS does not write these BWO-specific log records during CICS TS autojournaling.
  • CICS TS autojournaling does not contain proper RLS support. This means that log records produced by CICS TS autojournaling cannot be guaranteed to correctly recover a VSAM sphere that was opened and updated using RLS.
Despite the known risks, some users want to use log records produced by CICS TS autojournaling to forward recover VSAM spheres, because this process has the following advantages over forward recovery logging:
  • It eases the transition from CICS/ESA V4R1 to CICS TS (because you do not need to update the CICS file definitions with forward recovery logging information).
  • It eliminates some of the overhead that occurs with forward recovery logging.
With these possible limitations, CICS VR can forward recover a VSAM sphere from log records produced by CICS TS autojournaling. However, note again that IBM recommends using log records produced by CICS forward recovery logging to recover VSAM spheres. Also, please note the following restrictions when log records produced by CICS TS autojournaling are used for the forward recovery of VSAM spheres:
  • CICS VR change accumulation does not support log records produced by CICS TS autojournaling.
  • CICS forward recovery logging must not be enabled for the VSAM spheres that you want to forward recover from log records produced by CICS TS autojournaling. This means that the CICS VR VSAM batch logger cannot at present be used to log updates made to the same spheres by batch jobs.

The following sections explain the steps required to enable CICS TS autojournaling for VSAM spheres and to set up CICS VR to forward recover the spheres from the autojournal log records.