DATASET

File organization in really old COBOL code.

May 7, 2020 Mainframe , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I encountered customer COBOL code today with a file declaration of the following form:

000038   SELECT AUSGABE ASSIGN TO UR-S-AUSGABE            
000039    ACCESS IS SEQUENTIAL.                   
...
000056 FD  AUSGABE                                                     
000057     RECORDING F                                                  
000058     BLOCK 0 RECORDS                                              
000059     LABEL RECORDS OMITTED.                                       

where the program’s JCL used an AUSGABE (German “output”) DDNAME of the following form:

//AUSGABE   DD    DUMMY

The SELECT looked completely wrong to me, as I thought that SELECT is supposed to have the form:

SELECT cobol-file-variable-name ASSIGN TO ddname

That’s the syntax that my Murach’s Mainframe COBOL uses, and also what I’d seen in big-blue’s documentation.

However, in this customer’s code, the identifier UR-S-AUSGABE is longer than 8 characters, so it sure didn’t look like a DDNAME. I preprocessed the code looking to see if UR-S-AUSGABE was hiding in a copybook (mainframe lingo for an include file), but it wasn’t. How on Earth did this work when it was compiled and run on the original mainframe?

It turns out that [LABEL-]S- or [LABEL]-AS- are ways that really old COBOL code used to specify file organization (something like PL/I’s ENV(ORGANIZATION) clauses for FILEs). This works on the mainframe because a “modern” mainframe COBOL compiler strips off the LABEL- prefix if specified and the organization prefix S- as well, essentially treating those identifier fragments as “comments”.

For anybody reading this who has only programmed in a sane programming language, on sane operating systems, this all probably sounds like verbal diarrhea.  What on earth is a file organization and ddname?  Do I really have to care about those just to access a file?  Well, on the mainframe, yes, you do.

These mysterious dependencies highlight a number of reasons why COBOL code is hard to migrate. It isn’t just a programming language, but it is tied to the mainframe with lots of historic baggage in ways that are very difficult to extricate.  Even just to understand how to open a file in mainframe COBOL you have a whole pile of obstacles along the learning curve:

  • You don’t just run the program in a shell, passing in arguments, but you have to construct a JCL job step to do so.  This specifies parameters, environment variables, file handles, and other junk.
  • You have to know what a DDNAME is.  This is like a HANDLE in the JCL code that refers to a file.  The file has a filename (DSNAME), but you don’t typically use that.  Instead the JCL’s job step declares an arbitrary DDNAME to refer to that handle, and the program that is run in that job step has to always refer to the file using that abstract handle.
  • The file has all sorts of esoteric attributes that you have to know about to access it properly (fixed, variable, blocked, record length, block size, …).  The program that accesses the file typically has to make sure that these attributes are all encoded with the equivalent language specific syntax.
  • Files are not typically just byte streams on the mainframe but can have internal structure that can be as complicated as a simple database (keyed records, with special modes to access them to initialize vs access/modify.)
  • To make life extra “fun”, files are found in a variety of EBCDIC code pages.  In some cases these can’t be converted to single byte iso-8859-X code pages, so you have to use utf-8, and can get into trouble if you want to do round trip conversions.
  • Because of the internal structure of a mainframe file, you may not be able to transfer it to a sane operating system unless special steps are taken.  For example, a variable format file with binary data would typically have to be converted to a fixed format representation so that it’s possible to seek from record to record.
  • Within the (COBOL) code you have three sets of attributes that you have to specify to “declare” a file, before you can even attempt to open it: the DDNAME to COBOL-file-name mapping (SELECT), the FD clause (file properties), and finally record declarations (global variables that mirror the file data record structure that you have to use to read and write the file.)

You can’t just learn to program COBOL, like you would any sane programming language, but also have to learn all the mainframe concepts that the COBOL code is dependent on.  Make sure you are close enough to your eyewash station before you start!

I see mainframes: a real life PDS container!

September 22, 2017 Mainframe , , , , , ,

I found a PDS container walking about my neighbourhood this morning:

 

Just like the mainframe version, you can put all sorts of stuff in this one.

A mainframe PDS (partitioned data set) is technically a different sort of container, as you can only put DATASETs (mainframe’ze for a file) in them. An example would be if you have two programs (loadmodules in mainframe’ze) both named PEETERJO, then you can create a two PDS datasets, each having a PEETERJO member, say:

PEETER.JOOT.IS.THE.BEST(PEETERJO)
PEETER.JOOT.IS.STILL.AWESOME(PEETERJO)

From these you could then choose which one you want your JCL script to execute with a STEPLIB statement like:

//A EXEC PGM=PEETERJO
//STEPLIB  DD DSN=PEETER.JOOT.IS.THE.BEST,DISP=SHR
//SYSOUT   DD SYSOUT=*
//SYSPRINT DD SYSOUT=*
//SYSTERM  DD SYSOUT=*
//SYSABEND DD SYSOUT=*

This works around the global name space issue that you’d have with storing two different datasets, both with the name PEETERJO.

You can also put any file into a PDS, provided you are willing to have the PDS member name for that file be a 1-8 character string. The PDS is sort of the mainframe equivalent of a directory (the long strings of A.B.C.D.E DATASET names can also be viewed as a directory of sorts).

I’m not sure if you can put a PDS in a PDS. If that is possible, I also don’t know if a PDS member can be accessed as a PDS without first copying it out.

Unpacking a PL/I VSAM keyed write loop.

June 7, 2017 Mainframe , , , , ,

I found myself faced with the task of understanding the effects of a PL/I WRITE loop that does the initial sequential load of a VSAM DATASET.  The block of code I was looking at had the following declarations:

     dcl IXUPD FILE UNBUFFERED KEYED env(vsam);
     dcl
        01 recArea,
            03 recPrefix,
                05 recID        PIC'(4)9' init (0),
                05 recKeyC      CHAR (4)  init (' '),
            03 recordData       CHAR (70) init (' ');

     dcl recIndx FIXED BIN(31) INITIAL(0);

     dcl keyListSize fixed bin(31) initial(10);
     dcl keyList(10) char(8);

As a C++ programmer, there are a few of oddities here:

  • Options for the FILE are specified at the file declaration point (or can be), not at the OPEN point.  They can also be specified at the OPEN point.  The designers of PL/I seem to have been guided by the general principle of “why have one way of doing something, when it can be done in an infinite variety of possible ways”.
  • There is a hybrid “structure & variable” declaration above.  recArea is like an object of an unnamed structure, containing nested parts (with lots of ugly COBOL like nesting specifications to show the depth of the various “structure” members).  It’s something like the following struct declaration (with c++11 default initializer specifiers):

    #include <stdio.h>
    
    int main() {
        struct {
            struct {
                char recID[4]{'0', '0', '0', '0'};
                char recKeyC[4]{' ', ' ', ' ', ' '};
            } recPrefix;
            char recordData[70]{ ' ', ' ', /* ... 70 spaces total */ };
        } recArea;
    
        printf( "recID: %.4s\n", recArea.recPrefix.recID );
        printf( "recKeyC: '%.4s'\n", recArea.recPrefix.recKeyC );
    
        return 0;
    }
    

    To PL/I’s credit, only ~45 years after the creation of PL/1 did C++ add a simple way of encoding default structure member initializers.

    We’ll see below that PL/I lets you access the inner members without any qualification if desired (i.e. recID == recArea.recPrefix.recId). The PL/I compiler writer is basically faced with the unenviable task of continually trying to guess what the programmer could have possibly meant.

  • The int32_t types have the annoying “mainframe”ism of being referred to as 31-bit integers (FIXED BIN(31)). Even if the high bit in pointers is ignored by the hardware (allowing the programmer to set 0x80000000 as a flag, for example for end of list in a list of pointers), that doesn’t mean that the registers aren’t fully 32-bit, nor does it mean that a 32-bit integer isn’t representable. I can’t for the life of me understand why a 32-bit integer variable should be declared as FIXED BINARY(31)?
  • The recID variable is declared with a PICTURE specification, as we also saw in COBOL code. PIC ‘9999’ (or PIC'(4)9′, for “short”), means that the character array will have four (EBCDIC) digits in it. I don’t quite understand this specification in this case, since the code (to follow) seems to put ‘RNNN’, where N is a digit in this field.

Here’s how the declarations above are used:

    
     keyList(1) = 'R001';
     keyList(2) = 'R002';
...
     OPEN FILE(IXUPD) OUTPUT;

     put skip list ('====== Write record to file by key.');
     do while (recIndx &lt; keyListSize);
        recIndx = recIndx + 1;
        recID = recIndx;
        recKeyC = 'Abcd';
        recordData = 'Data for ' || keyList(recIndx);
        write FILE(IXUPD) FROM(recArea) KEYFROM(keyList(recIndx));
     end;
     put skip list (recIndx, ' records is written to file by key.');

     CLOSE FILE(IXUPD);

My guess about what this ‘WRITE FROM(recArea)’ would do is to create records of the form:

0001AbcdData for R001
0002AbcdData for R002
0003AbcdData for R003
...

However, the VSAM DATASET (which was created with key offset 0, and key size 8), actually ends up with:

R001    Data for R001
R002    Data for R002
R003    Data for R003
...

Despite the fact that we are writing from recArea, which includes the recID and recKeyC fields (numeric and character respectively), only the non-key portion of the WRITE “data payload” ends up hitting the disk.

If that is the case, where do the spaces in the key-portion of the records come from? Again, the C programmer in me is interfering with my understanding. I look at:

dcl keyList(10) char(8);
keyList(1) = 'R001';

and think that keyList(1) = “R001\x00\x00\x00\x00”, but it must actually be space filled in PL/I! This seems to be confirmed emperically, based on the expected results for the test, but I can also see it in the debugger after manually relocating the 32-bit mainframe address:

(gdb) p keyLen
$1 = 8
(gdb) p /x aKey + 0x7ffbc4000000
$2 = 0x7ffbc5005740
(gdb) set target-charset EBCDIC-US
(gdb) p (char *)$2
$3 = 0x7ffbc5005740 "R001    R002    R003    R004    R005    R006    R007    R008    R009    R010    "

The final form of the records in the VSAM DATASET (mainframe for a file), is now fully understood. Note that the data disagrees with the PICTURE specification for the recID field in the recData variable declaration, but that’s okay, at least for this part of the program, since there is never any store to that field that is non-numeric. Would anything even have to have been written to recID or recKeyC … I suspect not? Once we have R00N in that part of the record what happens if we read it into recData with the numeric only PICTURE specification? Does that raise a PL/1 condition?

ps. Notice how the payload for the keyList array entries is nicely packed into memory. This is done in a very non-C like fashion with no requirement for an array of pointers and the corresponding cache hit loss those pointers create when accessing a big multilevel C array.

Still amused reading my PL/1 book: external storage.

May 28, 2017 Mainframe , , , ,

The z/OS Enterprise PL/I, Language Reference is the primary reference I have been using for the PL/1 that I’ve had to learn, but it is too modern, and not nearly as fun as the 1970’s era “PL/I structured programming book” I’ve got:

 

I’m not sure what a disk pack is, but I presume it is a predecessor to the hard drive.

Edit: Art Kaufmann, who I worked with at IBM, knew what a disk pack was (picture above from wikipedia):

“Back in the day, disk drives used removable media called “disk packs.” These were stacks of disks (usually about 2′ across) on a spindle with a plastic cover. See the IBM 2311 and 2314 for examples of these drives. You’d open the drive, lower the pack into place, twist the handle and remove the cover, then close the drive. The big risk was getting dust in when the cover was off; that would cause a head crash. Then some nitwit operator would either put a different disk pack in that drive (ruining that pack) or move the bad pack to a new drive, crashing that one. Or both.”

 

 

 

 

VSAM creation and population with JCL and IDCAMS

March 7, 2017 Mainframe , , , , , , , ,

I learned a few JCL DATASET related things yesterday that seemed notable, at least for a JCL newbie.

Delete a DATASET, and ignore any error.

Each time I’ve wanted a DATASET cleanup step in JCL I’ve been using a separate script, and running that first.  A better way of doing this is to include a IDCAMS job step in the script, and have that do the deletion

//CLEANUP EXEC PGM=IDCAMS
//SYSIN DD *
  DELETE PJOOT.XXXXX005
  SET MAXCC = 0
/*
//SYSPRINT DD SYSOUT=*
//SYSOUT   DD SYSOUT=*
//*SYSTERM  DD SYSOUT=*

This deletes the file PJOOT.XXXXX005, which in this case was a VSAM file. In case that file (a DATASETs in mainframe-eze) did not exist, the error code for that DELETE is ignored by setting MAXCC=0. If you have multiple things that you want to do with IDCAMS, you can do things like DELETE and then ALLOCATE immediately, such as

//REALLOC EXEC PGM=IDCAMS
//SYSIN DD *
  DELETE PJOOT.XXXXX005
  SET MAXCC = 0
  DEFINE CLUSTER (NAME(PJOOT.XXXXX005) -
               CYLINDERS(1) VOLUMES(LZ0000) -
               INDEXED -
               KEYS(4 0) -
               RECORDSIZE(240 240) -
               ) -
         DATA (NAME(PJOOT.XXXXX005.DATA)) -
         INDEX (NAME(PJOOT.XXXXX005.INDEX))
/*
//SYSPRINT DD SYSOUT=*
//SYSOUT   DD SYSOUT=*
//*SYSTERM  DD SYSOUT=*

This does the DELETE, ignores any error, and then proceeds to do the new ALLOCATE for the VSAM file. I haven’t seen any way described of ALLOCATING a VSAM file other than using IDCAMS, except in 3270 screens. I think I’ve seen that LzLabs has 3270 capabilities for this sort of stuff, but I’m not inclined to try to figure out how to use it. I’d rather use our much more intuitive GUI or do it in script with JCL like this.

Copy a DATASET.

Here is some JCL to copy an (INLINE) dataset into the VSAM file created above

//COPY2VS EXEC PGM=IDCAMS
//TARGET DD DSN=PJOOT.XXXXX005,DISP=(OLD,KEEP,KEEP)
//INLINEDD DD DATA,DCB=(BLKSIZE=240,LRECL=240,RECFM=F)
a
brown
fox
quick
/*
//SYSIN DD *
REPRO -
  INFILE(INLINEDD) -
  OUTFILE(TARGET)
/*
//SYSPRINT DD SYSOUT=*
//SYSOUT   DD SYSOUT=*
//SYSTERM  DD SYSOUT=*

There are two quirks that are noteworthy here.

  1. The VSAM file requires the input be sorted, which is why the words from ‘a quick brown fox’ are in the explicitly sorted order above.
  2. The VSAM file was created with RECORDSIZE 240, so the input file had to be forced to LRECL=240 to match.

Omission of either sort or the LRECL matching causes the VSAM load to fail.

This was the first time that I’d seen this specific INLINE DD syntax, with explicit parameters.  The way I’d seen it before was how SYSIN was specified above with ‘NAME DD *’, ending with C “comment start” /* sequence.  It turns out the default end of file delimiter can also be specified, for example, this also works:

//INLINEDD DD DATA,DLM=@@,DCB=(BLKSIZE=240,LRECL=240,RECFM=F)
a
brown
fox
quick
@@

Cat a file to spool

Because IDCAMS can copy files, this can also be used to cat a file to SPOOL if desired.  Here’s an example:

//CATVS JOB
//CATVS EXEC PGM=IDCAMS
//TARGET DD DSN=PJOOT.XXXXX005,DISP=(OLD,KEEP,KEEP)
//SYSIN DD *
REPRO -
  INFILE(TARGET) -
  OUTFILE(SYSOUT)
/*
//SYSPRINT DD SYSOUT=*
//SYSOUT   DD SYSOUT=*
//SYSTERM  DD SYSOUT=*

If I include a step like this, I’m able to see the file contents in our nice GUI spool browser along with the JCL script and all the other output.