Cheryl Watson’s TUNING Letter 2003, No. 4 has been sent out.

The fifty-two page 2003, No. 4 TUNING Letter was emailed to electronic subscribers today (September 26).  The print issues will be mailed next week.  You can purchase a printed copy of the current TUNING Letter for $95 at http://www.watsonwalker.com .  The following, from page one, highlights some of what you can find in our latest TUNING Letter.

What is System Managed Buffering (SMB), what can it buy you and how do you implement it?  Michael Friske looks at this feature that can save you time and money.  See page 31.

IBM has announced several new software pricing options.  If you take advantage of them, you could save thousands of dollars.  See pages 39, 46 and 49.

VSAM files often need tuning.  We picked up some pointers at SHARE (page 27).

WebSphere V5 looks, feels and behaves differently than previous releases.  There’s also a whole new vocabulary introduced with this new release.  See our discussion of V5 on page 39.

Floating point data has started appearing in new places such as the SMF file.  How do you handle these fields in assembler?  See our tutorial starting on page 36.

Three new Red Alerts (critical HIPER APARs) have been issued, two of them for DB2 users.  We list these on page 6.  Don’t miss IBM’s recommended service for important APARs on page 30, along with some interesting HIPER APARs found by Jerry Urbaniak (page 4).

Our Nuggets from the Forums section shows how to diagnose OEDIT contention problems and provides cautions when using the LIKE keyword.  See page 6.

As part of the new software pricing options, IBM has introduced the concept of two types of MSUs – pricing and capacity.  Our discussion of these important concepts is on page 49.  We provide a new zSeries CPU Chart with the new pricing (or software) MSUs.

At SHARE, Scott Fagen of IBM provided some great insight into the new console restructure of z/OS 1.4, as well as some great GRS tips.  In our SHARE Trip Report, we present some of his observations, starting on page 17.

The Table of Contents is listed below:

A Note from the Editors – 2
Management Summary  – 3
S/390 News

  • HIPER APARs – 4
  • Red Alerts – 6
  • Nuggets from Forums – 6
  • WSC News  – 9
  • The Net – 12
  • Publications – 12

Hot Flashes #10

  • z/OS – 14
  • VSAM RLS – 15
  • Miscellaneous – 16

SHARE Trip Report (8/03)

  • Console Restructure – 17
  • GRS – 21
  • Binder – 23
  • DFSMS – 25
  • VSAM Tuning – 27
  • z/OS – 30

System Managed Buffering – 31
Floating Point Data – 36
What’s New?

  • Software Pricing – 39
  • WebSphere V5 – 39

Cheryl’s List #79, 80, 81- 46

Supplement:

zSeries CPU Chart – September 2003 

 

Stay tuned!