IBM Mainframe Forum

Dear Forum Users,

We have a set of VSAM files with some number of records inserted on a periodic basis. Can we track the changes made to a VSAM file based on the Dates(Including the deletion of Records ). Could anyone please shed some light on the above or an RTFM link would be really helpful.

Jaggz

Unless the application is designed to log changes, there's nothing really in the system that will give you what you asked. SMF records can tell you that the VSAM file was changed, but there's nothing recorded in them to indicate what was changed, whether records were added, deleted, or updated, and so forth.

As Robert has indicated there is no way out for such a thing, however - why do you need this? What purpose will it serve?

Hello,

If the file is backed up periodically (daily, weekly, etc), a backup might be compared against the previous backup to identify inserts, deletes, and changes.

Depending on how backups are implemented, different methods would be used to do the compare.