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Status Future consideration
Workspace z/OS
Categories DFSMS PDS/PDSE
Created by Guest
Created on Jan 29, 2021

RELATED IDEAS

Request to add more flexibility to PDSE Member Generations

This is an enhancement suggestion for the next version of PDSE libraries.

With PDSE V2, you can retain multiple generations of members. This feature may have been added to close one of the remaining PDSE functionality gaps compared to regular PDS libraries: the ability to recover deleted and previous versions of members.

The problem with PDSE member generations is that the limit is per member. For example, if you set it to keep 10 generations of each member, it will keep 10 generations of every member, forever. This is not necessarily the best use of the space.

For example, consider our main source library, where only 1% of the members have been changed in the last year. 88% of the member haven't been changed in the last 10 years. There is no reason to keep generations for all of the members.

What would be a better use of the space is to be able to keep a certain number of the last changes or deleted members across the entire library. For example, we could say that it should retain the last 250 versions. This happens to be more like how PDS libraries work.

An alternative solution would be to keep PDSE member generations as is, but allow an SMS migration class to purge older generations. For example, in the migration class you could have a field that defines a retention rule, and then SMS could release the older generations, similar to how SMS releases free space.

Note: This is similar to how Fault Analyzer manages history file space. You can set a minimum number of entries it should hold, and once you hit the limit, it just purges old history when needed to free up space.

Idea priority Low
  • Guest
    Reply
    |     May 20, 2021

    Would it be acceptable to look at this as two solutions, short term and long term? Perhaps as a longer term solution, the enhancement idea could be considered for some future PDSE version (e.g. Version 3), so that the PDSE internal structures would be able to add support without performance degradation.

    But in the shorter term, yes, a utility could work.

    We would like to suggest flexible purge criteria, if possible, such as:

    • By maximum number of older generations
    • By last change date (however, what if a years-old member is deleted yesterday? Would it be purged?)
    • By member name pattern
    • By userid
    • Some combination of the above


    Our user that I've been in contact with regarding this also had the following suggestions that perhaps would be the subject of another RFE(s). There's a dearth of support for batch operations on Member Generations (or not really much support anywhere). There's no support in DFSMSdfp Utilities. Third-party utilities (e.g. PDS) haven't been updated. Our own company's utilities have no support. Nor do the utilities I support. ISPF's support is weak. The only place where support is improving is via IBM File Manager, but even that has gaps.

    So if we're going to create a PDSE purge utility, why not create a general PDSE utility? Such as, a utility program to do all the operations that one would want to do on PDSE member generations:

    • List generations
    • Print a generation (or punch)
    • Delete a generation
    • Rename a generation
    • Make a generation current
    • Purge generations
    • List PDSE attributes (such as is done as a side-effect of calling IEBPDSE)
    • Scan a PDSE's member generations for strings
    • Copy a member generation (e.g. to a new member name)

    Or, enhance IEBPDSE to be more general purpose, than just verifying PDSE integrity.

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     May 14, 2021

    Adding a data set-level limit to member generations would add a performance hit in absence of adding explicit enhancements to PDSE. If there was a utility that could purge generations older than a certain date independent of some form of SMS-managed policy and worked for existing PDSEs, would that be sufficient?

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     May 14, 2021

    I LOVE this idea!!!

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