Episode 18 "What we won't have in common anymore"

Here are the show notes for Episode 18 "What we won't have in common anymore". The show is called this because our Mainframe topic is about some removals in common storage planned for the release after z/OS V2.3.

Mainframe

Our "Mainframe" topic discusses a future planned removal coming in the release after z/OS V2.3.

• Four items actually form what we've titled "User Key In Common Storage Removal". This has been outlined in a Statement of Direction, and is documented in the z/OS V2.3 Migration Workflow and book.
  1. ALLOWUSERKEYCSA in DIAGxx will be treated as NO.
  2. Removal of support for obtaining User Key CSA
  3. Can’t change ESQA storage to User Key
  4. Can’t create a SCOPE=COMMON Dataspace in User Key.
• New capabilities with OA53355, which is at z/OS 2.1 and above:
  1. SMF 30 has been enhanced to identify jobs/steps that use user key common storage.
  2. SLIP Trap Capability. Single slip trap covering the removed items.
  3. A new z/OS Health Checker for z/OS health check, ZOSMIGV2R3_NEXT_VSM_USERKEYCOMM..

Performance

Martin talked about what’s in a data set name and this topic is about getting insight by parsing data set names. His reporting code, which processes SMF 14 (OPEN for read) and SMF 15 (OPEN for write) records, bolds data set qualifiers (or segment names) if they match any of a bunch of criteria. Now, new criteria have been added to investigating data set names.

The new criteria are job step name, dates (in lots of formats), job step program name, “SORT” in the qualifier, and system SMFID.

While the code doesn't see "partner" job names (for instance, where one writes to a data set and the partner reads from the data set), those could be detected using the Life Of A Data Set (LOADS) technique, which we can talk about more one day.

And surely there will be more interesting finds in other customers' data set names. As they are stumbled upon the code can be enhanced to learn these new tricks - as Martin refactored it to make it easier to add new criteria.

Topics

Our podcast "Topics" topic is about two cheap and fun pieces of hardware Martin has been playing with: Raspberry Pi and Arduino.

• Arduino is more hardware oriented. It is an open source hardware board. It is a microcontroller you download small programs to from e.g. a PC, written in a flavour of C. It is optimised for driving electronics, e.g. on a breadboard and boards you plug into the top of the Arduino (called shields).Martin has three Arduino shields: An SD Card reader/writer, a 7-segment display, and graphical LCD display.
• Raspberry Pi is more for software. It is a small cheap computer on a card.Martin's has 4 USB ports, HDMI, Ethernet, Wifi, and runs Raspbian. You can run other builds. He bought an HDMI monitor for it (HP 27es).He also found a Logitech K780 keyboard and a Logitech M720 mouse. Both of these can be switched instantaneously between 3 computers, connected via Bluetooth or USB.

Contacting Us

You can reach Marna on Twitter as mwalle and by email.

You can reach Martin on Twitter as martinpacker and by email and blogs at blog.