Guidelines for using wildcards

Try not to use wildcard characters, such as %, or +, or ++ in the first qualifier of a dataset mask. When the highest-level qualifier contains a wildcard, the software cannot use the standard mechanism to efficiently locate all matching datasets. Instead, the software must search and examine all of the catalogs to find matching datasets. This resource-intensive activity occurs every time the data is refreshed. When you retrieve a list, make sure that you delete the mask from the group.

If in a full catalog search, the total number of datasets on the system is large, a request may not begin before the next data collection cycle begins. In such cases, the collection cycle is adjusted dynamically so that it takes at least as long as the time it took to complete the request.