A non-CICS® application outside DFSMStvs is permitted to open a recoverable data set in RLS mode only for input. VSAM RLS provides the necessary record-level locking to provide read-with-integrity (if requested) for the non-CICS application. This support lets multiple CICS applications have the sphere open for read/write RLS access. CICS provides the necessary transactional recovery for the writes to the recoverable data set. Concurrently, non-CICS applications outside DFSMStvs can have the sphere open for read RLS access. VSAM provides the necessary locking. Because the non-CICS application is not permitted to write to the sphere, transactional recovery is not required.