That goes deep into the bowels of ISAM. You had the ability to specify different allocations for the (going off memory here) PRIME (the main data storage area), INDEX (obvious) and OVFLOW (overflow when hashes collided) areas of an ISAM file. And usually you had to for production files.
More than you never wanted to know, from the oldest online resource (OS/390 V2.4 DFSMSdfp 1.4 Using Data Sets, Appendix 1.4): http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/dgt1d404/APPENDIX 1.4 Later, Ray -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Howard Brazee Sent: Thursday November 09 2006 13:37 To: IBM-MAIN@BAMA.UA.EDU Subject: ISAM question I recently converted a tiny in-program ISAM file to an internal CoBOL table, but wondered about the JCL: //NAMES DD DSN=&&NAMES(PRIME), What does PRIME mean? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html