On Thu, 25 Jul 2013 23:59:49 -0500, William H. Blair wrote: >Don V Nielsen asks: > >| Where might one one find good instruction on how to read a dump? > >For the most part, everybody I know that's any good at it got that way all >on their own (they may have taken a class from IBM or Amdahl back when they >were young and green, however...)
When I was getting started as a Cobol programmer in 1970, I was given a paper with a title something like "Newspaper approach to dump reading". It was based upon a journalist's basic questions, who, what, when, where, why and how, that are necessary in any investigation. That document helped me get started reading SYSABEND dumps of my simple programs. I have no idea where it came from, but I wonder if it might have come from SHARE. Then, as an Amdahl SE, I attended classes in MVS internals and diagnosis. During my years there, I must have analyzed hundreds of dumps. Most of them were SVC dumps, but also the occasional stand-alone dump. In those pre-XA days, the dumps that I examined were all on paper. Today, I use IPCS. I have mentored some to help them with their dump analysis skills. A few have become quite competent at it. -- Tom Marchant
