DFSORT has been enhanced to improve use of central storage in relation to system activity. The existing EXPMAX, EXPOLD and EXPRES installation options will now be evaluated in conjunction with available resources at run-time which can give you better control over how DFSORT uses available central storage resources. The likelihood of over committed central storage resources and excessive paging has been reduced, which can provide improved reliability and performance for all workloads including DFSORT.

The shipped default for EXPOLD is changed from MAX to 50%. The shipped default for EXPRES is changed from 0 to 10%.

DFSORT has been enhanced to allocate storage in smaller increments and then check resource availability before each additional increment is reserved. This can allow concurrent sort applications to better share available storage and allows sorts to stop allocating additional storage if resources are no longer available. Additionally, DFSORT's dynamic allocation of work data sets will be adjusted to reduce the likelihood of failure when a sort application is unable to obtain all of the expected central storage and must then use more disk work space than expected.

A new TUNE installation default allows you to specify whether DFSORT should allocate storage in increments with additional disk work space to minimize the risk of failure, or to allocate all storage at initialization so disk work space allocation can be reduced.

Blockset merge applications can now use storage above 16 MB virtual with more functions (such as E61, INREC, OUTREC, INCLUDE, OMIT and SUM), providing improved performance and virtual storage constraint relief.