To coincide with the launch of our new Publications website, Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2017 No. 2 was published on July 24th. This and future issues will only be available on the new site, but we think that you will agree that this is a much more usable, and mobile-friendly, delivery mechanism than the single large PDF that we emailed to subscribers previously.
This issue of the Tuning Letter contains information about the new WLM ‘metering and capping’ capability that was released (using IBM’s continuous delivery mechanism) earlier this year. This new capability was initially positioned as a way to control the capacity consumption of Spark on z/OS. However, the new container pricing that was included in the recent z14 announcement will also exploit this function. Even if you are not using Spark on z/OS and are not even using capping on z/OS, you should be familiar with this new technology.
We also have the latest in Cheryl’s series of articles about one of her favorite topics – SMF. This installment summarizes the many additions and changes that were delivered for SMF records in z/OS 2.2 and subsequent APARs. If you are the person responsible for SMF data in your site, or you work with nearly any piece of software that runs on z/OS, you should check out this article to see what fascinating goodies lie waiting for you in your SMF data.
Speaking of SMF data and getting the maximum value from it, we also have an article that leads you step by step through the process of creating a Spark Java program to extract any fields you want from the plethora of SMF record types that are supported by Spark. And our VSAM RLS customers will be interested to hear that the queries we used as the basis for our examples were developed by IBM’s VSAM RLS experts – Terri Menendez and Neal Bohling. So, whether you are interested in using Spark with SMF, or in using the VSAM RLS SMF records to manage and tune your VSAM RLS environment, this article will have something for you.
We also have information about our new IBM Systems Centers Technical Bulletins page. Our collection is slowly growing, thanks to contributions from IBMers and customers, but if you have any Orange (or Yellow, or Blue, or even the elusive Purple) books that would be willing to let us scan, please let us know. We have an article about recent industry alliances, mergers, and proposed takeovers that could impact just about every mainframe installation. And, of course, there is our usual analysis of interesting or important APARs, Techdocs, Redbooks, and websites.
This issue does not have anything about the z14 announcements – we had to send it to the publisher just before the announcement, but expect lots of exciting information about z14, z/OS 2.3, container pricing, and much more in our next issue. Stay tuned!