Minutes of the GSE UK IMS Working Group Meeting London, 14th June 2001

Chairman: Frank Fleming frank.fleming@barclays.co.uk 01565-613581

Secretary: John Boyle john_boyle@bmc.com 01784-478832

Web Site: http://web.ukonline.co.uk/dougie.lawson/gse/

Administration

Printed copies of some of the presentations were distributed at the meeting. If anyone wants to receive a copy of any of the presentations please email working group chairman - Frank Fleming. A gift was presented to Peter Armstrong (BMC Software) in recognition of his contribution to the Working Group over the years, in his capacity as minutes secretary, and presenter.

Introduction
- Frank handed out the usual welcome pack, including agenda, list of attendees, problems / contacts form and a feedback form. As always, members were urged to complete the feedback form, as this provides the steering committee in planning agendas for future meetings.
- There were 25 attendees from 16 companies.
- Apologies: Ian Tyson - GSE UK IMS Meeting Organiser (Macro4) AXA Insurance, AC Nielsen, Candle, Federal Mogul, Standard Life.
- Minutes of meetings are posted on the web site, and distributed by email
Minutes
- The minutes of the last meeting had been circulated by email. These were two matters arising.
  1. Date of Edinburgh meeting is Thursday September 20th, and not 29th as stated in the minutes.
  2. Since IBM have now expanded their range of IMS Tools, and have included news on these tools during their regular - IBM What's New' session, it has been suggested that other Software Vendors should also have an opportunity to provide product news to members. There was general agreement with this. The Chairman will contact relevant ISVs before future meetings to request either one foil with recent announcement information, or in the event of more major announcements, invite the Vendor to give a 15 minute - What's New' presentation
Correspondence
- No correspondence.
Future Meetings
- Thursday September 20th Edinburgh - Standard Life Office
- Wednesday/Thursday December 5th/6th - Two day joint meeting with DB2 and CICS Working Groups Proposed Venue - Hale Barns (Manchester) Frank would like at least two volunteers to present at this joint meeting .

IBM What's New - Niel Kenyon, IBM

Education
- Some course codes have changed. General format is CCNNL where CC is the subject code (usually CM for IMS courses) NN is the course number, and L is the country code for the course location (U for UK)
  - New Course - CM11U IMS Systems Programming - Four day course covering installation and maintenance of an IMS DB and IMS TM system. June 25th -28th, and October 8th - 11th.
  - CM01U - IMS Fundamentals - Three day course introducing the basic facilities of IMS. Formerly CA02. October 3rd - 5th.
  - CM70U - 3 days IMS V7 Update. October 17th - 19th.
  - Other Mainstream IMS Courses - see IBM UK Education web site.
  - Additional IMS courses - contact Alan Cooper (alan_cooper@uk.ibm.com) or Pete Sadler (pete_sadler@uk.ibm.com) or Niel Kenyon (niel_Kenyon@uk.ibm.com) if interested.
  - CM22U - Physical Organisation of Databases
  - CM60U - IMS V6 Product Enhancements
  - CM61U - IMS V6 Shared Queues
  - CM64U - IMS V6 Fast Path Enhancements
  - CA42 - ETO
  - CM41 - Fast Path
  - CM50 - Block Level Sharing
  - CM51 - RSR (Remote Site Recovery)
  - CM56 - APPC/IMS Implementation
  In addition to education offered in the UK, there are a number of PSSC courses available which may be of interest, including
  - IMA61F - IMS Data and Message Queue Sharing Workshop. Scheduled for 5th - 9th November. Hands on experience with an IMS 6.1 system in a Parallel Sysplex environment.
  - IMA65F - IMS Connectivity and WEB Enablement.
  - IMA70F - IMS V7 Product Enhancements
  These courses are offered in Montpellier, France and further details can be found on the French Section of the IBM Learning Services Web Site. (Course description etc. is in English!)
Other Events
- IMS Tech Conference 22nd -25th October Miami

Niel provided a high level overview of the following new tools/versions from IBM

Fault Analyzer for OS/390 - Abend management system. Supports IMS, CICS, and DB2. Provides assistance in debugging application abends.
File Manage for OS/390 - File management tool to assist in setting up and manipulating test data via ISPF. Version 2 - GA Aug 2001 supports IMS and DB2 data.

IBM Global Services are offering assistance in getting a fast start with e-Business Technology Enablement. They can help you establish web connectivity to your legacy IMS and DB2 applications.

APAR PQ42127 enables IMS to exploit zSeries 64 bit real storage by moving OSAM and Log buffers above the 2GB bar.

BMC and the Shrinking Batch Window - John Boyle - BMC Software Ltd.

John's presentation covered various factors which are leading to increased pressure to reduce batch run times and improve online system availability. It examined various factors which affect batch performance and throughput, and some of the methods which can be employed to help fit your growing batch processing into your shrinking batch window.

Overlapping database backups with your batch applications by exploiting hardware snapshot capabilities using Image Copy Plus.
Online Reorganisation using MAXM Reorg Online and Online Defrag.
Database partitioning using RYO code, Fast Path or HALDB.
Improved Batch Logging including automatic backout and restart, using Batch Control Facility.
Automatic checkpoint/restart to enable traditional Batch to run as BMP allowing concurrent online access using Application Restart Control.
I/O optimization and job re-structuring using Mainview Batch Optimizer.

This newly launched product reduces batch run times by dynamically tuning sequential and random I/O by exploiting available buffering techniques, and by splitting jobs up to allow non-dependent job steps to execute in parallel. It also provides I/O avoidance by - piping' data between writer steps and reader steps.

SMP/E and all that - Frank Fleming - Barclays Bank

Frank's presentation was following up on the presentation given by John Butterwick at the last meeting, which made various recommendations about how to maintain your IMS systems. It provided an insight into Barclays IMS environment, and how it is maintained.

Twenty-six IMS Systems
Ten scheduled maintenance outages per year
Three Global Zones per IMS Release
- PUT - used for new release installation
- DMR - used to prepare the next scheduled change
- LIV - what is in production
In-house - roll' process to promote from one zone to the next
CBPDO Tape every 6 weeks
Upgrade every 6 months - to latest PDO minus three months
Extract enhance hold data every week

More SMP/E - Dougie Lawson - IBM UK

Dougie reviewed a recent SHARE presentation which covered various aspects of IMS maintenance. The presentation can be viewed online or downloaded from He recommended that you review IBM's Service Upgrade Facility (SUF). This is a web based automatic maintenance process. Some enhancements were made earlier this year, including additional SYSTEMHOLD classes, to assist in identifying what is applicable to your setup. Enhance Hold Data is also available on the web, and should be retrieved weekly.

For details on OS/390 HOLDDATA see information at http://techsupport.services.ibm.com/390holddata.html

For access to other online support facilities please see http://techsupport.services.ibm.com/eserver/support

The presentation (in Lotus Freelance) is too big to store here. Please e-mail Dougie Lawson to get a copy.

Hints & Tips, Problems and Contacts

None

Requirements

Name:Lance Hall from Tesco Stores (Lance.Hall@Uk.Tesco.com)
Problem:Further discussion on requirement to allow the status of IMS elements (e.g. Databases, Programs, Transactions) to be preserved across a Cold Start. This would be useful when for example a database had been /DBR'd prior to an IMS shutdown for a scheduled Cold Start. An additional issue was noted relating to data sharing, where a database which had been taken off-line by a /DBR Database Global would become online to an IMS system which was down at the time of the /DBR, but was then warm started.
Comments:Lance will work with Neil Price to formalise this for voting at the next meeting.

LUNCH

TMON for IMS - Les Benn - Landmark Systems Inc.

Les gave a detailed presentation on this new addition to Landmark's product family. The product can be closely integrated with Landmark's other monitor products (MVS, DB2, CICS etc.), allowing cross product drill down to identify the root cause of a problem.

Other product features covered included

Exception monitoring and action triggered by user defined thresholds
System Overview Screen giving System Status, and highlighting “Potential Problem Areas”
IMS Initialisation parameters display
Lock holder and waiter displays providing the ability to diagnose and resolve cross system deadlocks in a Sysplex environment
Utility Manager to submit JCL to execute IMS utilities
Historical Reporting
Ability to issue Operator commands, allowing the product to interface with auto-operations packages

Les is based in the US, but further information is available from Landmark in the UK - contact Lynne Newman (lnewman@landmark.co.uk)

Round Table Discussion IMS V7 and HALDB Experiences

The discussion opened with a comment that there had been several items posted to the IMS List Server complaining that some recent maintenance had become PE and was preventing sites migrating to IMS V7.

Alison Coughtrie (IBM UK), who had supported the Early Support Program, said that the IMS V7 base code was very stable. The two PE fixes in question related to DBCTL.

Neil Price (TNT) said that the two PE fixes were already applied to their system when it was delivered to them by IBM. This install was done from a System Pack.

Frank Fleming (Barclay Bank) reported that they had installed and tested HALDB as part of the IMS 7.1 QPP. They did not encounter any problems, but have no plans to implement HALDB as they already use Fast Path. They felt that the separation of Partition Selection (into its own exit) from the Randomizer was a good design feature, and superior to the Fastpath implementation where the randomizer selects Area and RAP. Barclays plan to move IMS 7.1 to their development systems in July, and to production in October.

Neil Price expected TNT to be live on V7 before October. He would like to talk to anyone who had coded a HALDB Partition Selection Exit.

Alison Coughtrie reported that the first production implementation of IMS 7.1 would be during June, in Canada, with at least one other US customer going live in July.

Dougie Lawson (IBM UK) warned of one open V7 APAR relating to U3422 abend during /MODIFY PREPARE ACBLIB. The PTF fix for that is now available.

Neil Price said that the need to provide web access to IMS was one of their main drivers for keeping current with IMS.

Dougie Lawson said that OS/390 & z/OS were also pushing things forward on both hardware and software fronts.

Alison Coughtrie stated that there were less problems with the code than at the equivalent point in the life of IMS V6.

Sorry if your contribution to this discussion was not recorded. I was scribbling as fast as I could!

AOB

None

Meeting feedback

Topic	Comments	Score
IBM - What's New?	Very informative	4.47
BMC and the shrinking Batch Window	Useful but not sure how/if this would work in our environment Some follow up required (by the installation?)	3.61
SMPe & All That	We have less systems to maintain and take a different approach Very useful. No mention of whether route is receive/apply/accept or whatever	3.86
All That SMPe	Would be nice to have a copy of the foils posted on the website (see above)	3.86
zOS License Manager		3.6
The Monitor for IMS	Impressive product. If it is as robust as TMON/CICS it will be preferable to Omegamon in my view	3.87
IMS V7 Discussion	Can we do this again in 6-9 months time? One for the future	3.64

Offers of presentations (Thank you - we will be in touch)

Requests for topics

Setting up of Stored procedures/ODBA

CBPDO and System Pack - A brief presentation on how they work - any tips on how they work. Are the dialogues OK or do people bypass them. Which is best? This should be aimed at a new sysprog who hasn't used them before.