The limitation is the usercat itself, not the master catalog. We have our TSO user population spread out over 12 usercats. ISTR that 3000 is about our limit, which I can check tomorrow morning to be exact. I also found this limit the hard way, encountering a not so obvious message. Suspecting the worst I attempted to define a group of 1000 aliases in ucats I suspected to be nearing their limit, an admittedly crude but effective test. Once the ucat fills up it's a simple matter to count the max by listing all the alias names.
Without checking further, I'm speculating that the 3000 max is related to some catalog record size specification. I wrote some additional crude code to count the alias names in all masters and ucats in the house just to eyeball our proximity to 3000. -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Leonard Woren Sent: Wednesday, May 18, 2005 8:30 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: ICF ALIAS limit >>You'll find it in the "Managing Catalogs" manual. For z/OS 1.6, >>SC26-7409 (I have the -03 level). >> >>Here's an excerpt from that manual... [chop] I see how that excerpt could be misinterpreted. An RCF is in order. (Don't look at me, I don't do much with mainframes these days.) > > 3000 seems small (to me). Is this *REALLY* saying 3000 per usercat? > > A 3000 gross number seems just to way low, IMO. > > The limit is per system. > More exactly: aliases are defined in MCAT, which is one per system. That explanation does't help at all. My recollection of the way it works is that each UCAT entry also contains a list of all the ALIAS records which exist and point to this UCAT. In fact, I think that any entry which has aliases pointing to it contains a list of those aliases, so that when the entry is removed all the aliases can be deleted without reading every record in the catalog (MCAT in the UCAT case). I've run shops with way way more than 3000 TSO users all with a unique catalog alias. I did discover the alias limit the hard way once -- DEFINE ALIAS failed with some message equating to "catalog record full." > It > is possible to define aliases in UCAT, but these aliases are unusable. That depends on what you're talking about. You can have a non-vsam entry in a ucat and have an alias in that ucat for that non-vsam entry. /Leonard ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
