VSAM Tuning

An old process, but still and important one as a properly tuned VSAM file will save you both CPU and disk costs, and those savings can be considerable. If you want to do the tuning yourself then you could look at the following options:

1. JCL Buffers
2. LSR Buffers
3. System managed buffering
4. VSAM parameters
5. File Extents

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Otherwise your could look at purchasing a VSAM tuning product like TurboTune from Critical Path Software Inc. (CPSI)

CPSI makes the bold statement about TurboTune. "If your returns don't outweigh your investment, you don't pay for our services" and claim that they have never failed to be paid for their work in 20 years. A typical site can expect to see savings and a return on their investment in between 6 and 12 months. Those savings would come from reduced CPU usage and DASD usage.

The CPSI methodology includes providing access to the TuboTune database, TurboTune performance modules and experienced consultants.

The Database contains hundreds of millions of statistics that have been gathered from tuning exercises in hundreds of client sites over the past 20 years. It combines CPSI knowledge with data gained from software vendors, performance experts, IBM and consultants from around the world. The database is constantly updated with new products and tuning parameters as they are found in clients environments.

This data is sent to an expert system, a suite of mathematical relationships which analyzes each data set in order to identify 'problem' data sets. The system performs an average of 1,500 calculations per file to generate the appropriate procedures to fix the problem.

One of the problems companies face with this type of analysis is finding the time and resources to run it. All TurboTune needs is access to VSAM/CICS statistics, LISTCATs, File usage statistics and JES Logs to begin an in-depth analysis and CPSI claims that their expert consultants do the bulk of the work. This data is fed into a spreadsheet and compared with an existing comparable 'best in class' client.

Finally, CPSI will produce a series of reports with detailed instructions on which files require improvement and what must be done to improve them.

Critical Path Software recently added two new TURBO products, DB2 Contention Analyser and CICS Contention Analyser. These products use the expert performance tuning database combined with statistics from your DB2, CICS and User Catalogs to identify performance problems in DB2/CICS regions. Specifically, these products will reduce contention and CPU usage, while improving throughput and response times.

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