Well, I used a DCB exit to select a block size if none was provided. OTOH, I kept seeing IBM procedures with 3200 long after that was too small.
-- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of Gerhard adam [gada...@charter.net] Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2020 3:20 PM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: [External] Re: Here we go again; ... and so goes the mythology. The truth is that programmers routinely used lousy block sizes and wastes tremendous amounts of space. JCL sizes were rarely scrutinized nor was data set usage. It was entirely possible for test data to exist for weeks or months beyond its usefulness This isn’t to say that money was obviousness spent and even wasted, but few installations took managing their DASD seriously. They would worry about saving a byte by packing a date while wasting 100 tracks due to poor blocking. This is why nothing really happened until System Determined Blocksize, and the Storage Administrator tools became available. People certainly wrung their hands but rarely did anything about it Get Outlook for iOS On Wed, Apr 22, 2020 at 12:08 PM -0700, "Pommier, Rex" <rpomm...@sfgmembers.com> wrote: Agreed. Another thing to remember was that we were dealing with disk volumes measured in kilobytes or megabytes instead of terabytes. In addition, the site I cut my teeth on had all removable disk packs that got rotated onto the drives for processing of each application. Every byte saved per record gave us the better chance of fitting the entire set of datasets on a single disk set so we could process it. Rex -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List On Behalf Of Charles Mills Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2020 12:32 PM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: [External] Re: Here we go again; Faulty logic there. A byte here and byte there and pretty soon you have to buy ANOTHER unit of DASD. It costs the same empty or full, but if it gets nearly full you have to pay for another. Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Gerhard adam Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2020 10:06 AM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: Here we go again; The notion of “savings” was marketing nonsense. The DASD was paid for regardless of whether it held a production database or someone’s golf handicap. It cost the same whether it was empty or full. The notion of “saving” was nonsense and even under the best of circumstances could only be deferred expenses ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN The information contained in this message is confidential, protected from disclosure and may be legally privileged. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient or an employee or agent responsible for delivering this message to the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any disclosure, distribution, copying, or any action taken or action omitted in reliance on it, is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by replying to this message and destroy the material in its entirety, whether in electronic or hard copy format. Thank you. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN