Retained locks are created when a failure occurs. The locks need to remain until completion of the corresponding recovery. The retained locks have meaning only for RLS access. Lock requests issued by RLS access requests can encounter the retained locks. Non-RLS access does not perform record locking and does not encounter the retained locks.

To ensure integrity of a recoverable sphere, VSAM does not permit non-RLS update access to the sphere while retained locks exist for that sphere. An installation might need to run a non-CICS application that requires non-RLS update access to the sphere. VSAM RLS provides an IDCAMS command that sets the status of a sphere to enable non-RLS update access to a recoverable sphere while retained locks exist. This command does not release the retained locks. VSAM informs the CICS® transaction servers that hold the retained locks when they later open the sphere with RLS.

Related reading: For information about non-RLS access to data sets that have retained locks, see Accessing data sets that have retained locks or lost locks.