About the TRSMAIN terse utility

The terse utility is prerequisite on z/OS® platforms, if you want to compress collected data.

It might already be installed because it is often used during the installation of operating system fix packs. The utility is freeware and can be downloaded from this IBM® Support website. The terse utility is based on US patent number US04814746. TRSMAIN provides two compression methods, PACK and SPACK. Only SPACK is used with Buffer Pool Analyzer because it provides the highest compression ratio.

IBM supports only version 2 of TRSMAIN, shipped in 1993, and later versions. Further, support is limited to the SPACK option.

When used with Buffer Pool Analyzer trace data files, the compression ratio is approximately 75 percent.