Welcome to the new CCA
By Rick Ryan, CCA President
We are committed to providing our customers with the solutions and strategies you need to maximize your information technology investments. With this in mind, Dick Stewart, CEO of Praxis International Inc., announced changes to our business and organizational structure that we believe will strengthen our ability to provide you with the products and services you require to be successful well into the next century.
On Monday, April 8, 1996, two business units were created: Computer Corporation of America (CCA) and Praxis OmniReplicator. The CCA business unit will focus on serving the long-term requirements of our Model 204®, System 1032®, MarketPulse®, and Imagine customers. The Praxis OmniReplicator business unit will concentrate on the emerging market for data replication.
The decision to restructure Praxis into two business units was driven by the realization that each product group demands a different management and sales focus to best address its unique requirements. We are quite proud of the long-term success of the CCA products. As we move forward, Model 204 and System 1032 customers will require timely product enhancements and superior levels of customer service. Our strategy for our customers will include a stream of new product releases that exploit the latest computer and hardware advancements and extend the volume of data into the end-user and client/server computing environments, as well as new value-added services that support our customers' long-term strategies.
Over the coming weeks and months you will hear more about our growing and evolving business. We will share our plans for new products and services, customer advisory boards, regional meetings, and other activities that we believe will enhance our long-term partnership with you, our customers.
Thank you for your continued support.
1996 IMPACT Conference begins May 19
SAN FRANCISCO: The 1996 IMPACT Conference is only a week away. CCA has scheduled an exciting program of classes, technical reviews, and product demonstrations with the IMPACT board of directors.
A number of System 1032 and Model 204 senior technical experts will discuss areas of software development that make Model 204 and System 1032 superior for large system application shops in IBM®and DECTM environments. They will also highlight how customers can take advantage of our client/server offerings.
Also, CCA will present several highly charged demos of our processing capabilities, demonstrating the use of Internet Web access for Model 204 and System 1032, showing how each can be the server for Web- based client/server applications.
Rick Ryan, the new President of CCA, will take the opportunity to share with the user communities his vision of CCA corporate directions for Model 204, System 1032, and Connect* products.
V9.6 and V3R2.1 maintenance releases
System 1032 and Model 204 have new maintenance releases available. The latest version of System 1032 is V9.61 (not to be confused with the previous V9.60-1). This is the most recent version for both VAX and AXP systems. This version incorporates all patches that have been produced since the release of V9.60-0 in December of 1994.
With V9.61, a new installation option was introduced. Sites now have the choice of installing the entire software kit from scratch or installing only an overlay kit. The latter takes advantage of the fact that only the shareable image portion of the software has changed, but requires that the user currently have one of the V9.6 versions already installed on the target cluster.
Version 3R2.1 incorporates pre-applied maintenance for Model 204. This release corrects a number of problems that were reported on the initial V3R2 release pertaining to the SORT feature, as well as maintenance for other reported problems. This release of pre-applied maintenance will help you to migrate into production more quickly and easily.
With this shipment, V3R2.1 becomes the current supported commercial release of Model 204 (superseding V3R2.0). All V3R2 customers must upgrade to V3R2.1 as soon as possible to obtain the benefits of the pre-applied maintenance.
Model 204 Technical Note:
Hidden Gems in V3R2.1
By James Damon
A number of important features in V3R2.1 may have escaped your notice and we'd like to point out a few of these to ensure that you derive the greatest benefit from this new release.
At the system level, we have dropped the requirement that all CCASERVR datasets be allocated on identical device types. This allows you to allocate CCASERVR on a 3390, CCASERV0 on a 3380, CCASERV1 on a 9345, and so on. This is especially helpful when you allocate CCASERVR datasets on SYSDA volumes and cannot predict which device pool and which type of device will be used to allocate any particular dataset. Remember, how-ever, that space still must be allocated in CONTIGuous CYLinders and that the maximum value of SERVSIZE cannot exceed the cylinder capacity of the smallest device used for any CCASERVR dataset.
At the file level, we have implemented a new command, MONITOR FSTAT, which allows you to view file-resource-consumption statistics from the online environment without having to access CCAAUDIT. MONITOR FSTAT shows cumulative statistics for all files currently opened. These statistics begin accumulating when the first user opens a file (most recent, real-operating-system OPEN) and are cleared when the last user closes the file (real-operating-system CLOSE). MONITOR (PARTS) shows cumulative statistics for the file PARTS. MONITOR (PARTS,ORDERS) 1 puts the terminal into perpetual monitoring mode (PA1, K, or C to escape) on these two files, allowing you to observe changes in real time.
At the application development level, we have implemented the DISPLAY GTBL command, which allows you to display GTBL variable names and their values using a number of different options:
We have also improved run-time-error-message reporting with the new parameter, DEBUGUL. Various settings of this parameter generate mes-sages indicating the failing statement number associated with any run time error encountered during evaluation of a PERMANENT procedure. This should improve online debugging and the speed of application development.
That's all for now. ... jim
System 1032 Technical Note:
Allocating disk space for datasets
By Nancy Diettrich
As a disk or datafile becomes fragmented, performance degrades, sometimes to the point where internal operations fail to complete. To help prevent this, system managers must rebuild disks on a reg-ular basis to "squeeze" the free blocks together. The same benefit is achieved by regularly rebuilding a dataset.
Occasionally you need to reserve a block of contiguous space for your data records. This is a straightforward operation using the ALLOCATE command. You have the option of allocating the desired number of either records or blocks. Using ALLOCATE regularly before large updates makes contiguous space available and minimizes fragmentation.
Allocating space for data Use the ALLOCATE 1000 RECORDS command to reserve enough disk blocks for 1000 records of data. The disk blocks are as contiguous as possible, given the state of the physical disk.
Use the ALLOCATE 0 BLOCKS command to find out how many unused records are still available from a previous allocation.
Bear in mind that ALLOCATE reserves space only for data and has no effect on the allocation of space for internal structures such as keytables.
TIP: Allocating space for keytables You can reserve space for keytables by manipulating the way that System 1032 manages space. Use the following series of commands to allocate contiguous space for keytables and data. (Note that the keytables must not be stored in a separate DMK file.)
To obtain informational messages about how much space was used for previous loads to this dataset, we recommend that you turn on messaging via the KEY DEFAULTS command. You can use this information as a guideline for future loads.
More next time! ... nancy
This newsletter is the first edition to come to you from the new CCA. CCA has a goal of customer satisfaction, and this newsletter is one means to that end. Look for CCAPRINT in your mailbox once a month.
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