1. About Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2010 No. 5
2. Correction to Tuning Letter 2010 No. 4
3. Two Upcoming Conferences
1. About Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2010 No. 5
The forty-seven page 2010 No. 5 Tuning Letter was emailed to paid subscribers on November 11. You may visit our website at www.watsonwalker.com to obtain subscription information and the table of contents. The following is Tom’s Management Summary page from that issue, talking about some of the contents of this latest Tuning Letter:
User Experiences
Networking – it’s a method that most managers use to stay abreast of the most current aspects of their jobs. But what’s a single systems programmer or performance analyst to do when they have no peers to communicate with? This is getting to be more the case with people working from home or remotely. We think the best method is (after subscribing to the Tuning Letter of course) to attend conferences like SHARE or CMG and develop a network of peers to reach out to (even if it’s just via email).
But if that’s not possible, then some of the forums are the next best things. We’ve mentioned before that performance and capacity planners have a useful forum atwww.mxg.com (even if you don’t use MXG). Another popular forum is IBM-Main, but with its huge volume of posts (100 or so each day) and the numerous off-topic posts, most overworked sysprogs and performance people lose patience after a while.
So we’re using this entire issue of the Tuning Letter to share the experiences of our readers, posters on the forums, and other contacts of ours. Not only have we dug through the forums for the most useful items for you, but we’ve also included references and done research that isn’t available from the original emails. We’re sure that some of these shared tips can prevent similar problems in your own installation.
The amount of information intended for z/OS systems programmers, performance analysts, and capacity planners is staggering. With many installations being short on staff due to the economy, essentials such as training get squeezed. One of the things that we do is to research the manuals, announcements, APARs, white papers, and many other sources so that your staff can gain the benefit without spending the hours of time it takes. For example, we read about 100 documents a month just from the WSC site, bringing you those most applicable to z/OS systems programming and performance.
Elsewhere In This Issue
You’ll find many other useful items throughout this newsletter: z/OS 1.12 provides such great allocation benefits for DB2 that you should consider bypassing z/OS 1.11 • We think that PFA (Preventive Failure Analysis) is the path to a self-managing z/OS, and we discuss some of the myths surrounding it • A paper on best practices for running WebSphere on z/OS should be required reading • Two, not one, great papers on how to classify WebSphere in your WLM policy • Beta experiences on the IBM Smart Analytics Optimizer – 40 minutes elapsed down to 1.3 seconds? Wow!
2. Correction to Tuning Letter 2010 No. 4
Our thanks go to Howard Merrill of Verizon Wireless for finding the following typo: We included a link to a information APAR on page 52 of our Tuning Letter 2010 No. 4. The reference said II14590, but it incorrectly linked to II1450, causing a page not found. It will be corrected in the DVD. Here is the correct link:
II14590 (26Aug2010) – OEM Bugs in DFSMSdss 5695DF175.
3. Two Upcoming Conferences
CMG starts next week, December 6-10, in Orlando, Florida. It’s not too late to register. See http://www.cmg.org/conference/.
My favorite conference, of course, is SHARE. I think it provides the best education for the money. The next SHARE will be February 27 through March 4 in Anaheim, California. Remember that it’s gone back to a 4.5 day conference and won’t end until noon on Friday. My “Hot Flashes” session has returned to its 9:30 am spot on Friday. See www.share.org and click on Events, or go directly to http://www.share.org/Events/UpcomingConference/tabid/349/Default.aspx. Hope to see you there. You’ll save $200 by registering before January 14.
Stay Tuned!