Ed Gould wrote > > I always disliked the IPCS handling of dumps. > It was just never (to me) a straight forward invocation like AMDPRDMP. > I fought it until the bitter end. Maybe because I was missing SHARE a > lot and never got to any of the sessions. That and I have a gut > instinct not to like VSAM. I dislike the VSAM volume ownership issue > the most (I think). > > Any requirements out there to rid IPCS of any VSAM usage? > No such requirement has made it into the requirements data bases, and I'm not certain that you'd like PRDMP in this day when typical customer applications are no longer utility jobs running in one address space but interactive elements that depend on server address spaces: DB2, IMS, TCPIP, .... Dumping enough of such an environment to capture needed information has made dumps larger and more complex. Most of us need a much higher level of presentation than the hex and EBCDIC that got us by when we could go to one or two module listings to understand what was going on or going wrong, and the high level reports that you're equipped to read differ from the ones that I can use well. As a practical matter we can't format all the reports that you're going to want until you see the first of them and maybe get in touch with someone who is an expert in an area whose code is active in the scenario. VSAM is a key to being able to save work that you've done with a dump while you get access to additional information that you may need. PRDMP saved nothing but the dump itself between one session and the next.
The only alternative to VSAM that ever was considered seriously was DB2. But DB2 is not available on every customer system, and, in the 1970s when the comparisons were being made, it was very new and not the reliable product that it has since become. If (unlikely) we reopened that debate today, DB2 (and competitors) and an in-storage memory model that would mesh with portable hierarchic file systems would become the contenders. But VSAM keyed support remains attractive, sorting symbol tables and storage maps for simple, rapid retrieval in a legible report or simple, rapid, and selective retrieval to answer a specific question. Bob Wright - z/OS MVS Service Aids ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
