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1.  About Cheryl Watson’s Tuning Letter 2009 No. 5
2.  Sample IEFU29L Exit?


1.  About Cheryl Watson's Tuning Letter 2009 No. 5

The fifty-three page 2009 No. 5 Tuning Letter was emailed to paid subscribers on October 22nd. You may visit our Web site at www.watsonwalker.com to obtain subscription information. The following is our Management Summary page from that issue, talking about some of the contents of this latest Tuning Letter:

APARs
We hope the Focus of this issue will convince performance analysts and capacity planners to take a more proactive view of performance and new function APARs (Authorized Program Analysis Reports). Of course, that might take them an hour or so a day, and it's you the manager who may have to make that call. I highly recommend that you read the article on page 3 about APARs entitled Why You Should Read This. We explain how any installation can benefit from a little more attention to certain types of APARs. And if your staff doesn't have time to do the research, then at least use the research that we provide in every issue of our Tuning Letters. It's impossible not to gain enough savings to justify the cost of the Tuning Letter many times over.

A major part of the Focus is an explanation of all of the codes and flags present in an APAR (How to Read an APAR). While the senior staff has learned about this through experience, new employees may find it difficult to understand APARs and PTFs (fixes for APARs). There is no single document available to IBM customers that describes how to read an APAR, the life of an APAR and the meaning of all the codes. We provide this, and we expect this issue to be one of your staff's most used references. If you, as a manager, want to understand the life of a problem as it moves through the system, see The Life & Death of a Problem on page 4.

z/OS 1.11
z/OS 1.11 was announced in August, and unless you're an installation that installs a release immediately, it may be another year before you can get the performance improvements and usability enhancements available in the new release. However, many of these enhancements can be exploited on older releases (even back to z/OS 1.8). To help you implement these enhancements, we've listed these functions and related APARs on page 36.

Elsewhere in this Issue
Did you know that many of the software vendors provide sub-capacity pricing? Well they do, and you should be taking advantage of the software savings (page 30). • If you're considering solid state drives, IBM now has a free tool to help you find the best candidate data sets (page 34). • Many of the questions we receive have to do with NEON Software's zPrime announcement. See the latest status on page 34. • Our News section brings you 26 new APARs that your installation should be looking into. • IBM's WSC group has begun to try webinars. The first, still viewable, features Kathy Walsh presenting her Performance Hot Topics. See page 46. It was a huge success (with over 500 attendees), so we hope it continues.

2.  Sample IEFU29L Exit?

A reader asked for a sample IEFU29L exit (SMF switch for SMF Logger) and I don't have one. Although IBM distributes IEFU29 in SYS1.SAMPLIB, they don't distribute IEFU29L. Is any installation that uses the SMF Logger willing to share theirs?  I could simply pass it along to the reader or post it on my website in the Free Tools section to share with everyone (if you're willing).

Stay Tuned!
Cheryl Watson

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