COBOL - INITIALIZE

In a COBOL INITIALIZE statement, elementary FILLER items are ignored. That means, INITIALIZE does not touch the values in the FILLER.

e.g.,

01 WS-VAR.
05 FILLER PIC X(5) VALUE 'junk1'.
05 WS-FILLER PIC X(5) VALUE 'junk2'.
05 FILLER PIC X(5) VALUE 'junk3'.

After the statement INITIALIZE WS-VAR is executed, FILLER contains 'junk' ,whereas WS-FILLER contains all spaces.

Effectively, WS-VAR changes from 'junk1junk2junk3' to 'junk1 junk3'.

DB2 "OPTIMIZE FOR 1 ROW"

Use this clause to avoid sorts - You can influence the access path most by using OPTIMIZE FOR 1 ROW.

OPTIMIZE FOR 1 ROW tells DB2 to select an access path that returns the first qualifying row quickly. This means that whenever possible, DB2 avoids any access path that
involves a sort.

In "OPTIMIZE FOR n ROWS", if you specify a value for n that is anything but 1, DB2 chooses an access path based on cost, and you won't necessarily avoid sorts.

SDSF POS Field

I used to sort the jobs by POS (position) field in SDSF. This puts all the jobs in ascending order by date and time except the jobs that are in input queue or that are currently executing - they always appear in the top.

However, we recently upgraded from z/OS 1.8 to z/OS 1.9 and I don't see it sorted this way any more and the POS field is not populated by any value either. So I asked my sys prog and she asked IBM.

IBM's answer is here:
"The difference your seeing is described by the HOLD data for APAR OA26013 now PE'd by OA27126. The difference in behavior on the panel has to do with a change in the way SDSF gets the jobs/data for the panel. Previously, SDSF read the data from spool which meant running thru the queues and calculating the POS field on its own. These POS values were calculated erroneously by SDSF, assigning a position value to jobs on all queues.

Starting in SDSF 1.9, we're using JES2 SSI calls to acquire the job information which returns the correct POS values assigned by JES2. The POS field on the SDSF ST panel only applies to jobs on the INPUT queue, that is, jobs in-and-awaiting execution, not to any other queues like OUTPUT, SPIN and HARDCOPY.

These changes were necessary to expand support for SDSF to include JES3 compatibility and is considered working as designed."

So, now I'm sorting my jobs by ST-DATE and ST-TIME which is not the same as sorting on POS but comes a little close to that. I miss my POS field :(

CICS EIBRESP=27

Last week I was coding a simple CICS program and in the first execution, I got this error message:

EIBRESP=27 and EIBRESP2=0

As per the CICS manual, EIBRESP=27 means "Length Error". Well I found it strange that it got a
length error. After analyzing further I found that, I forgot to define the program in CICS. I defined it in CICS and then ran the program again, it started working !!

Why wouldn't CICS give me a straight forward "I cannot find this program in CICS" instead saying "Length Error"?

Well, the problem is solved now, I'm not worried about it anymore.

DB2 SQLCODE -497

If you get an SQLCODE -497 while trying to run a QMF PROC, read this:

SQLCODE -497 means "THE MAXIMUM LIMIT OF INTERNAL IDENTIFIERS HAS BEEN
EXCEEDED FOR DATABASE database"

You need to run the MODIFY utility with RECOVERY option to fix this issue.

The MODIFY online utility with the RECOVERY option deletes records from the SYSIBM.SYSCOPY catalog table, related log records from the SYSIBM.SYSLGRNX directory table, and entries from the DBD. You can remove records that were written before a specific date or you can remove records of a specific age. You can delete records for an entire table space, partition, or data set.

Sample SYSIN for MODIFY:

MODIFY RECOVERY TABLESPACE database.tablespace DELETE AGE(365)