Protection through generic profiles

By using generic profiles, your installation can reduce both the number of profiles required to protect data sets and the size of the RACF® database, thus making RACF protection easier to administer. In addition, generic profiles are loaded into storage when first needed, are not deleted when the data set they protect is deleted, and are not volume-specific (that is, data sets protected by a generic profile can reside on any volume).

You can define a generic profile to protect data sets in one of the following ways:

By issuing the ADDSD command and specifying the generic characters *, %, or, if enhanced generic naming is active, ** in the profile name. Profile names that contain generic characters can protect a number of similarly named data sets.
By issuing the ADDSD command and specifying the GENERIC operand. Use this operand when the profile name you specify does not contain any generic characters, in which case it is a fully qualified generic profile. A fully qualified generic profile protects only those data sets whose name matches the profile name exactly. For example, you might define a fully qualified generic profile to protect data sets with the same name that reside on different volumes.