Wednesday, January 21, 2009

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 :(

4 comments:

John said...

I'm missing it, too... POS was doing a clean job of showing the jobs in the order they were submitted....

Thanks for the info, mate!!

Kumaresh T said...

You are welcome John.

- Aji

thisguy262 said...

What do I type on the command line to sort first by date and then by time?

If I type "sort st-date" and then "sort st-type" it just ends up sorting by time. i can't figure out how to concatenate the 2commands

Thanks for your help

Kumaresh T said...

thisguy262,

To sort on two fiels such as st-date and st-time, issue the command like this:

SORT ST-DATE A ST-TIME A

This sorts the jobs by start date in ascending order then on start time in ascending order. If you want to sort them in descending order, issue this:

SORT ST-DATE D ST-TIME D

Thanks for stopping by.

- Aji