Dumps produced by the DRA

The DRA produces an SDUMP in these situations.

DBCTL creates an SDUMP containing diagnostic information for a DL/I request failure from CICS® using the system dump data sets from the CICS job.

  • If the DRA fails
  • If a thread fails
  • If DL/I set a high order bit in PAPLRETC for a thread request
    However, the DRA does not always take a dump if DL/I sets the high order bit in PAPLRETC. If it does not, it sets the second high order bit on to indicate this. For example:
    • If PAPLRETC is 1000 0000 3 2 4 0 0 0, a dump was taken
    • If PAPLRETC is 1000 1000 3 2 4 0 0 0, a dump was not taken

    (See Return codes in DBCTL, Using return codes to find out what kind of dump is produced and PAPL request and return codes for information on interpreting these return codes.)

An SDUMP is created in a terminate address space request or a terminate thread request while running in DBCTL and under the DRA TCB.

An SDUMP contains:
  • DBCTL address space
  • DLISAS address space
  • A storage list for the DRA area on the request
  • Key 0 CSA storage for the request processing
  • MVS storage blocks: address space control block (ASCB), TCB, and RBS for the failing DRA TCB
  • The local system queue area (LSQA)
If the SDUMP request fails, a SNAP dump (which contains a subset of the information in an SDUMP) is produced instead. (See Return codes in DBCTL.) The SNAP contains the following subset of the information produced in an SDUMP:
  • MVS storage blocks: address space control block (ASCB), TCB, and RBS for the failing DRA TCB
  • A storage list for the DRA area on the request

Because the DRA runs in problem state, it cannot access other storage areas, such as CSA or DBCTL storage. This may mean that the SNAP does not contain enough information, and you may have to re-create the failure and use the DBCTL address space dump.

See Diagnosis in IMS product documentation for a further comparison of the information produced in SDUMPs and SNAP dumps, which you may find useful in diagnosis. This information also includes details about the IMS offline dump formatter (ODF), which you can use to show the layout of IMS blocks referred to in these dumps.