IBM Mainframe Forum

Dear friends.
I want to see the list of all catalogues (master and user) in the our train environment of Z/OS.
I want to know where am I in the our M/F train machine?
If I want to be a system programer what is the starting point?

just one question for each post please!

All z/OS systems have a (1, singular) master catalog. Although there are other methods, the easiest way to determine the name of the master catalog is to use IDCAMS to display information for a dataset known to be cataloged in the master catalog such as SYS1.LINKLIB. Write this IDCAMS control statement. You will get output like thisThe master catalog is NONE.OF.YOUR.BUSINESS.

You can determine the user catalogs by writing this IDCAMS control statement.The output will be the list of user catalogs.

Mehdi shri wrote:Dear friends.
I want to see the list of all catalogues (master and user) in the our train environment of Z/OS.
I want to know where am I in the our M/F train machine?

Sounds as though you think you are in a hierarchy - you are not.

Actually, both are correct. There is a 2 level hierarchy: the master catalog at the top, and one or more user catalogs. I've never encountered a situation where a user catalog points to another user catalog. I think the structure could be built, but I don't know what catalog lookup would do if it encountered such foolishness. I have one catalog entry in my personal userid that is an alias of an actual dataset in the same catalog, and catalog management and job management handle the situation just fine.

The old OS/360 CVOL catalog structure was a hierarchy within a single catalog, and it was very inefficient. In 1988 I found myself in a project to mass copy data, and we found it took longer to update the CVOL catalogs than to copy the data! One of the more clever ideas I ever had was to write a program to update the catalog directly rather than use catalog management to update the catalog. I could do this easily because I had intimate knowledge of the catalog structure from writing other programs to process these catalogs. Since VSAM BCS catalogs are supposed to be ordinary VSAM datasets, the index lookup is somewhat hierarchial, but it's much more efficient than the stupid structure in OS/360 CVOL catalogs.

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Mehdi shri (Mon Oct 08, 2012 12:39 pm)

If I want to be a system programer what is the starting point?

It has been 20 years since I was a system programmer, though once you are one, I think it is a skill that you can keep claiming.

Study the manuals:
System Commands, Initialization and Tuning Guide, Parallel Sysplex Overview, RACF, MVS Diagnosis: Tools and Service Aids, IPCS, SMP/E, etc...

Pedro makes excellent points, but much more important, at least to me.

You must learn how to do these things more or less on your own, without whining about it in resources such as this.

and their structures.

You need to know about catalogs, AMS, Volume Table of Contents (VTOC), LISTCAT command, DFSMS, storage administration, etc...