You may have noticed that I didn’t include any info on the presenter in the blog entry on IBM web conference on CICS Performance Basics … Dan Zachary’s name sounded familiar, but I could not recall anything about him.
I shot Dan an email, and it turns out that Dan works in CICS Level 2 Support, and he assisted me with a PMR back in 2003. (I believe that was the last PMR I worked on; it’s been ETR’s since.) On this PMR, we had a linked program that was abending; it had a GOBACK coded instead of an EXEC CICS RETURN. Changing the GOBACK to an EXEC CICS RETURN was a workaround, but IBM was able to provide a fix to allow the code to run with the GOBACK. It turned out to be an LE issue, but Dan was very helpful in making that determination.
Now-a-days a GOBACK is handled same as an EXEC CICS RETURN … Anyone else remember when issuing a GOBACK in CICS caused CICS to terminate? Instead of returning back to the calling program, it returned control back to the operating system. I do not recall when that was changed, but I still pause when I see a GOBACK in CICS application code.
Anyway, Dan is an Advisory Software Engineer with IBM and has worked with CICS Level 2 Support for going on 20 years. He knows what he’s talking about – be sure and catch the web conference if you can! I’ll have to miss the original broadcast, but will catch up when it is made available for replay.
Steve Baugh - The CICS Guy 