Recently I had to get some people started with a few utilities. I thought to share this here. They will be in the next few posts for searchability reasons.
There are more ways to Rome, as we say here, so please feel free share you variants in a comment. (I unfortunately need manually curate comments to filter out the spam which is even with this small site overwhelming.)
On 2 December, in a session organized by the Dutch GSE, the IBM User Group, specialists from the IBM Garage in Montpellier performed a presentation and live demonstration of running Linux containers in a z/OS Container Extension (zCX). After the session, there was a short discussion about use cases for z/OS Container Extensions, introduced by a view on this topic by Rabobank.
Bil Pereira’s channel is a great and very informative Youtube channel. He is adopting new tech for the mainframe and tries it all out, while explaining his experiments on his Youtube channel.
In my previous post I shared a way to execute operator command from a batch job using Rexx and SDSF. That is of course a bit cumbersome if you just want to fire off a fixed operator command.
Therefore here the simplest way to execute an operator command:
One of the many way to execute an operator command from a batch rexx program.
With this solution here, with Rexx and SDSF, you can embed the commands in more complex business logic, and use Rexx variables to dynamically establish values for the commands to be issued.
By the way I have started a repository on GitHub on which I will share assets in the future.
This year COBOL was delivered 60 years ago as one of the first general purpose, cross-platform programming languages.
On 8 January 1960 the ‘COBOL Executive Committee’ formally approved the design of the programming language “COBOL 60”.
One of the very early adopters of the programming language in the Netherlands, and long time member of the COBOL standard, Wim Ebbinkhuijsen, did a very nice talk at the event organized by Ordina. He went through the history of COBOL through the past 60 years. As a close observer and influencer of the programming language you get a great insight in this recent history of computing. Slides can be found here.
Some time ago I did a short summary presentation on my experience with replication solutions for Db2 on z/OS. The pictures and text are quite generic, so I thought it might be worthwhile sharing the main topics here. The picture below summarizes the options visually:
Queue replication
Synchronizes tables. The synchronization process on the capture side reads the Db2 transaction log, and puts the updates for which a “subscription” is defined on a queue. On the apply side, the tool retrieves the updates from the queue and applies them to the target database.
SQL replication
Also synchronizes tables. In this case the capture process stores the updates in an intermediate or staging table, from which the apply process takes the updates and applies them to the target tables.
Data Event Publishing
Takes the updates to the tables for which a subscription is defined and produces a comma-delimited or xml message from it which is put on a queue. The consumer of the message can be any user-defined program.
Change Data Capture
CDC provides a flexible solution that can push data updates to multiple forms of target media, whether tables, messages or an ETL tool.
Requirements
After my short summary, we dug a little in the requirement’s for the specific problem this team was aiming to address. They needed:
A lean operational database for the primary processes.
Ad-hoc and reporting queries on archival tables, where data in archive table can be kept over several years.
The amount of data is relatively large: it should support tens to hundreds of millions of database updates per day, with a peak of tens of millions in an hour.
Target database management system was not decided yet; could be Db2 or Oracle.
So a solution should replicate the operational database to an archive database, while data must be very current, demanding near-realtime synchronization.
We focused a it on the Queue Replication solution. The target DBMS for Queue replication can be Db2, Oracle and SQL Server (and a few more). Furthermore, in my experience this solution can support:
High volumes in peak periods: millions of row inserted/updated in short period of time
Latency can remain within seconds, even in peak periods – this does require tuning of the solution, such as spreading messages over queues.For selected table you can specify suppress deletes, which allows for building up of historical data.
There are a few concerns in the Queue Replication solution:
Data model changes will require coordination of changes in source, Queue Replication configuration and target data model.
Very large transactions (not committing often enough) may be a problem for Queue Replication (and also a very bad programming practice).
The most useful ISPF EDIT macro ever. I think it was written by Paul van Goethem from Belgium, somewhere before 1993. It has quickly spread through many sites.
Point your cursor at at dataset name in a file your are editing en executing the macro will launch an EDIT session of that file.
I always put in under PF key PF4 which by default has the not very useful default value RETURN.
Note the value of the variable INVALID in the below may be corrupted. It should contain any character that is not valid as part of a dataset. The binary values it can contain are not very portable.
/****************************REXX***********************************/
/* FUNCTION: RECURSIVE EDIT OF BROWSE VIA DSNAAM AND,OR MEMBER */
/* SPECIFIED VIA CURSOR SENSITIVE EDIT MACRO */
/* FORMATS ACCEPTED: */
/* DATA.SET.NAME : EDIT/BROWSE OF THIS */
/* DATA.SET.NAME(MEMBER) : EDIT/BROWSE THIS */
/* MEMBER : EDIT/BROWSE IN SAME LIBRARY AS INDEX */
/****************************REXX***********************************/
ADDRESS ISPEXEC INVALID= ",'\<\>,:;+��▖!�%�-="
ADDRESS ISREDIT 'MACRO (FUNCTIE)'
FUNCTIE = TRANSLATE(FUNCTIE)
IF SUBSTR(FUNCTIE,1,1)='B'
THEN FUNCTIE='BROWSE'
ELSE FUNCTIE='EDIT'
LIN=0
ADDRESS ISREDIT '(LIN,COL) = CURSOR'
ADDRESS ISREDIT '(CLINE) = LINE 'LIN
/* FIND CURRENT WORD */
T=SUBSTR(CLINE,1,COL)
T =TRANSLATE(T,' ',INVALID)
Y=LASTPOS(' ',T)
IF Y=0
THEN T=CLINE
ELSE T=SUBSTR(CLINE,Y+1)
PARSE VAR T WOORD .
WOORD =TRANSLATE(WOORD,' ',INVALID)
"CONTROL ERRORS RETURN"
IF INDEX(WOORD,'(') /= 0 THEN DO /* TAKE DSN IF SPECIFIED */
PARSE VAR WOORD DSNAME '(' MEMBER ')'
FUNCTIE" DATASET('"SPACE(DSNAME)"("MEMBER")')"
FRC=RC
END
ELSE DO
IF INDEX(WOORD,'.')/=0 THEN DO
PARSE VAR WOORD DSNAME .
FUNCTIE" DATASET('"SPACE(DSNAME)"')"
END
ELSE DO
ADDRESS ISREDIT "(DSNAME) = DATASET"
WOORD = SPACE(TRANSLATE(WOORD,' ','.()'))
FUNCTIE" DATASET('"DSNAME"("WOORD")')"
END
FRC=RC
END
ADDRESS ISPEXEC "CONTROL ERRORS CANCEL"
IF FRC> 4 & SYMBOL(ZERRMSG)/= 'LIT' THEN DO
MSG= ZERRMSG':'ZERRLM
"SETMSG MSG(ZOM000A)"
END
RETURN
