Have you read the IBM Announcement Letter for z/OS 1.12? There is a lot of good stuff there, but the one thing that really has my interest is the new Control Area Reclaim capability for VSAM files. Like most (if not all) shops, the shop where I work has to make online VSAM KSDS files unavailable for some amount of time to reorganize them due to CA and CI splits that naturally occur when VSAM records are added. In z/OS 1.12, IBM is promising improved performance, minimized space utilization, and improved application availability with the CA Reclaim capability that will be included in the release.
Will we soon be saying goodbye to planned outages of VSAM files, to using MacKinney Systems’ CEMT from Batch (or newer MacKinney Batch to CICS product) to close files so they can be reorganized and open them again in CICS when done, and to having to monitor file I/O times to keep response time as optimal as possible? With a new world of CICS capabilities to catch up on (web services, Atom feeds, CICSPlex, CICS Explorer, and much more!), we CICS sysprogs need more time to keep up!
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Steve Baugh - The CICS Guy 