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Playing Well With TurboIMAGE

By Steve Hammond

Inside VESOFT covers tips and techniques you can use with VESOFT’s products, especially MPEX.

Ever been stuck in the meeting from hell? You know the type I’m talking about. You don’t need to be there to begin with, but someone above you on the org chart says, “He should be in on this. Get him in here!” So you go to the meeting and discover there is absolutely nothing discussed that has to do with your duties and it’s about as interesting as Ron Popiel hyping his rotisserie cooking system on cable at 3 AM (“But wait, there’s more...”).

Well, now you know what I was faced with last week. I got pulled from doing something that was actually part of my job and was productive to sit in this meeting. Important side note: most of our production (and non-HP 3000) systems use as a database the product that begins with the letter “O,” as in “Oh my God, who picked this!” About 15 minutes into the meeting, two of the DBAs got into an argument about how to ‘fix’ something in the database and how it should be done. The majority of the remaining 75 minutes of the meeting were spent in DBA-speak — drop tables, import, export, etc. And the bulk of that time was used trying to determine how long it would take do what they need to do. And the estimate were not in minutes or even hours, but in days! One of the changes was deferred until the Columbus Day weekend since there was an extra day they could use.

In all modesty, I want to now nominate myself for the Interex Hall of Fame for not jumping up and giving both of these gentlemen a Dope Slap that would do the Click and Clack Magliozzi brothers proud! I wanted to grab both of them by the collars, give them a shake and explain to them that if they dropped that over-designed, overly complicated product and moved to the DBMS that is so elegant, TurboImage, then they could get their weekends off. But then we wouldn’t need them anymore, so ... never mind.

Which brings us to managing TurboImage databases. As I described in an earlier column, MPEX can quite aptly wear the tag that reads “Plays Well With Others,” and when it comes to dealing with modifying TurboIMAGE databases, it gets that tag with a star. MPEX has incorporated the ability to change dataset capacities using two of the most popular database management tools on the HP 3000 — Adager and DBGeneral. Adager is available from Adager and DBGeneral is available from Bradmark.

Before you run these commands, you do have some security issues to deal with. You must be logged on as creator of the database, in the same group as the database and have read, write and lock access to the database. If you don’t meet these criteria, MPEX will allow you to submit the command and then will stream a job that logs on as the database creator in the proper group and will prompt you for the appropriate passwords.

The commands are similar: DBADGALT and DBGENALT followed by the fileset and a ratio (hereafter I will refer to the commands as DBXXXALT and you can substitute ‘ADG’ or ‘GEN’ for the XXX - depending upon your database tool.

Changing a dataset capacity is as simple as:

%DBXXXALT @.PROD, .50

But this might be a bit too simple, since you will be changing the capacity of each dataset in the PROD group to a capacity of 50 percent — maybe not exactly what you are looking for. (I realize the use of a group is moot since you must be logged into the group - I do this just for a bit more clarity.)

Better yet is to incorporate some of those file attributes we spoke about in earlier columns:

%DBXXXALT @.PROD (DBSETFULLNESS > .8), 0.6

This says to look at all the datasets in the PROD group and find anything which is currently over 80% full and change it to 60 percent full. At first glance, I thought “That’s reducing the size of the dataset” but then I gave myself a Magliozzi Dope Slap and realized when something goes from 80 percent full to 60 percent full, you are increasing the size of the dataset. (Pass it off to spending too many hours in too many meetings with too many DBAs.)

You can use any of the dataset file attributes, although the other attribute besides fullness that I have used for this command is DBSETTYPE, looking for only detail or master datasets to modify.

MPEX also realizes that there are circumstances that call for you to have Adager or DBGeneral in groups or accounts that are not where MPEX expects them to be. You can tell where they are by placing one of the commands in the MPEXMGR.PUB.VESOFT file for execution at MPEX startup time:

SETVAR MPEXDBADGFILE “ADAGER.group.account”

SETVAR MPEXDBGENFILE “DBGENRL.group.account”

So, go out, deliver Dope Slaps to all those long-winded DBAs, and use MPEX to monitor and modify your TurboIMAGE databases.

Steve Hammond, who works for a trade association in Washington, DC, listens to Car Talk every weekend.