As to the "religious" aspect, I did try to signal the less-than-practical 
nature of my note with the <Rant> and </Rant> tags.

To your point about tailoring and dynamically submitting JCL, it really is an 
issue.  In a typical large z/OS shop today, dynamically tailoring and 
submitting JCL is only permitted for test environments and users.  "Production" 
JCL is frozen and controlled and submitted only by the scheduler software, and 
there is no political possibility to dynamically adjust the parameters even if 
it is technically feasible.

There *are* non-theoretical solutions to "runaway" file output.  The *ix system 
model of using "disk quotas" per "user" makes it entirely possible to imagine 
z/OS "application" users with "reasonable" disk quotas specific to the 
application (i.e., not by job but by suite of jobs).  Not the best solution?  
Maybe not, but ISTM to be better than having to predict what each and every 
process (i.e., job and file) output volume will be.

And there may well be other process models out there different from anything I 
know or imagine.  I don't claim to have an exclusive lock on ideas to replace 
what we have to deal with.

Peter

-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf 
Of Gerhard Postpischil
Sent: Monday, June 10, 2013 1:32 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Storage paradigm [was: RE: Data volumes]

On 6/10/2013 11:38 AM, Farley, Peter x23353 wrote:
> <Rant>
> Like a few others on this list, I have often gritted my teeth at the
> necessity to estimate disk storage quantities that vary widely over
> time in a fixed manner (i.e., SPACE in JCL) when the true need is
> just to match output volume to input volume each day.

If it's that predictable, it's trivial to write code to produce an 
estimated output volume from input, and tailor and submit the 
appropriate JCL. So that's a non-issue.

> EAV or not EAV, guaranteed space or not, candidate volumes, striped
> or not striped, compressed or not compressed - all of that baggage is
> clearly non-optimal for getting the job done in a timely manner.  Why
> should allocating a simple sequential file require a team of "Storage
> Administration" experts to accomplish effectively?
> </Rant>

There is no theoretical solution. On any system running jobs, it is 
possible for one job to monopolize available space, requiring other jobs 
to wait forever or be terminated. Even on a single job system that job 
may exhaust space. Requiring a space specification may be a PITA, but it 
guarantees that a started job will finish (subject to other 
constraints). And the SA experts, especially for sequential files, can 
be avoided with simple estimator programs.

This seems to be more of a religious war than a practical discussion.

Gerhard Postpischil
Bradford, Vermont
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