Donald Russell on IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@bama.ua.edu> wrote on 11/21/2011 02:43:10 PM: > > The use of the SORT to do this job seems to me to be much akin to > > using a piledriver to set a ten-penny nail., and I should be > > interested to know why you sought a canned solution to a problem of > > this sort. > > > > Though clearly the programming effort to write my own code to do this is > trivial, the reason for wanting a "canned solution" is to avoid all the > "business rules and procedures" associated with writing "custom code". > > If I roll my own, it has to go through the whole QA process, and > distributed to various geographically diverse MVS systems where I need this > capability. DFSORT is available right now. It's been debugged, it's been > accepted, it's in production, now. > > If DFSORT can do what I need, that's perfect. The cycles to run DFSORT for > this are less expensive than my and other people's time to properly support > it. > > If there's another "out-of-the-box" solution, I'm all ears. i.e. my cms/tso > pipelines solution suggested in my original post. (But I'm note sure we > have PIPELINES on all our MVS systems.) > > I'm also a big believer in using existing wheels. Why do I want to write a > program that already does what another, already available one does? > > The reason I need this capability is so I can extract a subset of records > from one or more tapes in various geographically diverse MVS sites, send > that data to another MVS site that has USS and do some stuff with it there. > I could just copy the entire tape across the country/globe, but I do have > some limits regarding wasted bandwidth/cycles. :-) > > It's a trade-off/balancing act.
I'm glad to hear that devoting most of my career at IBM to adding more and more functions to DFSORT and DFSORT's ICETOOL hasn't been a waste of time. :-) It's nice to know I can't be completely replaced by a couple of teenagers writing PL/I code. The "use a utility" vs "roll your own" argument seems to come up every now and then. Besides the QA process considerations and efficiency considerations, it often comes down to a "how complex does something have to be before you stop rolling your own" decision. Frank Yaeger - DFSORT Development Team (IBM) - yae...@us.ibm.com Specialties: JOINKEYS, FINDREP, WHEN=GROUP, ICETOOL, Symbols, Migration => DFSORT/MVS is on the Web at http://www.ibm.com/storage/dfsort ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
