Mainframe, MVS and zOS Discussion

Look at the CA-7 Interfaces manual and in particular at the CA-7 Driver functionality. CA-7 Driver allows you extensive date processing functionality in your scheduled jobs. Note, however, that submitting such a job from TSO or batch internal reader requires manual changes before the job will pass t...

From the CA-7 Primer manual Glossary: schedule ID. A scheduling variation. A job can have up to 255 different scheduling variations, each with its own schedule ID, scheduling criteria, requirements, and triggers. Example: you have a job that runs every day at 10 PM, but on Saturdays and Sundays you ...

Some sites used code reviews before a CICS program was allowed to be tested -- my first employer back in the late 70's and early 80's insisted their CICS team review every program for this type of problem before it could be defined in the test region. Some sites accepted the occasional CICS shut dow...

Glad to hear you got it resolved.

No -- the rule was, and is, that STOP RUN (or equivalent) be coded in the COBOL program. However, normally the logic was EXEC CICS RETURN END-EXEC STOP RUN. to ensure that the STOP RUN was not ever executed. The compile failed if the STOP RUN was not present, but CICS came down if the STOP RUN was e...

A GDG is actually quite handy. Consider a job run daily that backs up a file (or volume) to tape. For such backups, you normally want to keep a number of copies around (in case you need to recover from a day other than yesterday). If you want to be able to go back two weeks, define a GDG with 14 gen...

I would consider that a resubmit. Restart in the way I'm using the term would involve changing the JOB statement to include ,RESTART=(STEPNAME.PROCSTEPNAME) (assuming your job is using PROCs). Restart has implications for GDG processing, whereas resubmit will (especially if CA-11 or similar product ...

VSAM KSDS would be the first choice; the second choice would be a data base. IBM used to have ISAM files, which were non-VSAM indexed files, but ISAM is not available any more. If you have a good hash key, using a BDAM or VSAM RRDS would also work; "good hash key" means that one (or more) ...

The 01 level in an FD of the FILE SECTION defines a record -- period. Multiple 01 levels in an FD define the same data in multiple ways. In WORKING-STORAGE or LINKAGE, however, the record concept does not really apply since neither is associated with a file. But both handle all data in an 01 level a...

Google is your friend. Googling ims psb returned 1,280,000 hits and several of them on the first page answer your question about its name just from the summaries; I'm sure somewhere in the first few pages returned you can find the answer to your other question (I've never used IMS so cannot say for ...

IMS is a hierarchical data base; DB2 is a relational data base (if you don't know the difference, then your first task will be to find out the difference). IMS dates back to 1966 and the Apollo moon program; DB2 dates back to 1974 and System R. There are plenty of good books and online tutorials ava...

From the first days of the 360 machine, back in 1964, memory has been divided into 4-byte chunks called words. Bytes 0 to 3 represent the first word, bytes 4 through 7 represent the second word, and so forth. A double-word boundary is byte 0, 8, 16, .... and certain Assembler instructions need data ...

SEARCH/SEARCH ALL requires an index. For the most part, using a subscript or index otherwise doesn't really matter. An index represents an offset into the table whereas a subscript represents an occurrence but there's not a whole lot of difference forcing you to pick one or the other.

SECTION actually has out-lived its usefulness in COBOL. Way back in the old days, when an IBM 360-30 had 64K (yes, that was 65536 total bytes) of memory, large programs were divided into SECTIONS for memory management. All SECTIONS with the same ID number were linked into one piece of the load modul...

In COBOL, a variable must be able to be uniquely identified; this is done via qualification such as MOVE 1 TO VAR-X OF VAR-01 If the 01-level variable VAR-01 could have OCCURS, which VAR-01 is the qualification referring to? Other potential reasons include: - an 01 level represents a logical record;...

CA-7 has a Primer manual. You would do well to find a copy of that manual and study it carefully, including the Glossary.

There are multiple products that manage JES output spools (SDSF, IOF, and EJES come to mind right away), so you'll need to identify the product you are using before anyone could possibly answer your question.

Since you posted in the CA products section, are you wanting to know this for CA-7?

No, it is not possible. A sequential file means sequential -- as in, read the first record then read the second record then read the third record then .... If you want to do anything else, you either don't use a sequential file or you close and re-open the sequential file and re-read every record st...

The difference only appears when dealing with multiple job streams. Example: job A triggers job B triggers job C. At the same time, there is a different job stream where job D triggers job E triggers job F. Job B has a successor job of job F. If job E gets done at 11 AM and job B runs until 12 noon,...

Check out file 321 on the CBT tape (http://www.cbttape.org" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;) for a program that can analyze COBOL load modules and give you information about them such as compiler used and compile options. You are also over-simplifying the history of COBOL on ...