Steve Horein wrote:
I am in the process of building JCL to distribute resources across several
images. I've been leveraging 'SYMBOLS=' in JCL to assist in that capacity.
I've now come to a point where some conditional processing takes place, and
I am using IDCAMS IF-THEN logic to determine whether to ALTER - NEWNAME and
ALIAS - RELATE data set names to relieve GRS contention in certain
situations. The NEWNAME contains a system symbolic, which sparked the
memory of previously using SYMBOLICRELATE when it came to strategically
relating ALIAS entries.
Which lead me to wonder - will SYMBOLICRELATE functionality eventually go
away due to redundancy with the more flexible IAZSYMBL JES symbol service
being available?
<snip>
As the person who got the Catalog/VSAM team to create SYMBOLICRELATE
some time ago, *I* certainly do not want it to go away, and I doubt very
much that it will go away.
The reason we created it was to make volumes containing things like
subsystem data sets portable to help with software migration. Put a
usercat on the volume, named using the volume serial, use SYMBOLICRELATE
for the alias, IMPORT CONNECT the catalog, and create or update a system
symbol with the volume label. In addition, this can make volumes with,
for example, VSAM data sets portable. If you use a rotating set of
volume labels, it doesn't take much work to make the right levels of
like-named data sets available when you replace one of these volumes.
That people found other uses for this function is a serendipitous byproduct.
--
John Eells
IBM Poughkeepsie
[email protected]
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