Minutes of the GSE UK IMS Working Group Meeting Manchester - December 5th/6th 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

This meeting was Part 2 of the UK GSE Annual Conference. It was a two day joint meeting of the GSE UK IMS, DB2, and CICS Working Groups, and the UK MQ Users Group. There were some 'general interest' sessions attended by members of all groups, and some 'split' sessions covering IMS, DB2, CICS, and MQ related topics. A total of 116 people were registered for the event.

There was a brief meeting of the IMS Working Group. The proceedings of that meeting are minuted below.

Copies of the presentations delivered at the meeting will be available on the UK GSE web site in due course. (<http://www.gse.org.uk/>)

Introduction

There were 15 attendees from 9 companies.

Apologies: None received

Minutes of meetings are posted on the web site. Members are notified by email when new minutes are posted.

Minutes

Frank apologised for the delay in posting the minutes of the last meeting to our website.

There were no matters arising.

Correspondence

No correspondence has been received.

Future Meetings

As yet, no meetings have been planned for 2002 - the steering committee will meet early in the New Year. As always, suggested topics for inclusion in future meetings would be appreciated, as would offers to present.

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT

Frank Fleming announced that he would like to stand down as Chairman of the IMS Working Group. Frank felt that he was no longer able to devote the time and energy to the job which it deserved, and would like someone to take over from him next year. Frank will issue a separate note providing an outline of what is involved in chairing the group. All members are asked to consider whether they could take on this important role.

ISV News

Candle: No product announcements supplied.

BMC Software: One new product Message Advisor for IMS is now GA. See BMC Web site (www.bmc.com) for more information.

IBM What's New - Niel Kenyon

UK Education

• CM11U IMS Systems Programming - Four day course covering installation and maintenance of an IMS DB and IMS TM system. March 18th - 21st 2002.
• CM01U - IMS Fundamentals - Three day course introducing the basic facilities of IMS. Formerly CA02. March 5th - 8th 2002.
• CA09 - DBRC Three day course for IMS or CICS/DBCTL users covering all aspects of DBRC usage. November 7th to 9th.
• Other Mainstream IMS Courses - see IBM UK Education web site.
• Additional IMS courses - contact Alan Cooper (alan_cooper@uk.ibm.com), 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 11th - 15th March 2002. Hands on experience with an IMS 6.1 system in a Parallel Sysplex environment.
• IMA65F - IMS Connectivity and WEB Enablement. Dates TBA
• IMA70F - IMS V7 Product Enhancements. Dates TBA

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

• DB2 and IMS Technical Conference 18th - 22nd March 2002 Nice
  • There was some doubt as to the status of this event - a recent posting on the DB2 List Server stated that the event would no longer cover DB2. See IBM Web site for up to date information

• IMS Tech Conference 30th Sept to 3rd Oct 2002 St Louis

• A new release of the IBM DEBUG TOOL for z/OS IMS which provides support for debugging IMS Applications without running under BTS is planned for GA on March 19th 2002.
• HIPER PTF UQ52990 - Loss of IMS Log data, caused by closing log at the wrong point. Can lead to data corruption, loss of messages etc.
• New "Red Pieces" (soon to be published as Red Books) -
  • SG24-6514 IMS e-Business Connectors : A guide to IMS Connectivity
  • SG24-6404 IMS Version 7 Performance Monitoring and Tuning Update

Hints/Tips/AOB.

Brief discussion about effect of RAID type devices on WADS dataset IO, and the need to continue to do full track writes the WADS. Consensus was that IMS still 'thinks' that the WADS is on a 3390, so 'business as usual'. However, if anyone has any ideas on how IMS could better exploit current DASD technology, please email Dougie Lawson (Dougie_Lawson@uk.ibm.com), with a view to formulating a Requirement.