Concurrency and compatibility for LISTDEF

The LISTDEF utility has certain concurrency and compatibility characteristics associated with it.

LISTDEF is a control statement that is used to set up an environment for another utility to follow. The LISTDEF list is stored until it is referenced by a specific utility. When referenced by an utility, the list expands. At that time, the concurrency and compatibility restrictions of that utility apply, with the additional restriction that the catalog tables that are necessary to expand the list must be available for read-only access.

List processing limitations

Although DB2® does not limit the number of objects that a list can contain, be aware that if your list is too large, the utility might fail with an error or abend in either DB2 or another program. These errors or abends can be caused by storage limitations, limitations of the operating system, or other restrictions imposed by either DB2 or non-DB2 programs. Whether such a failure occurs depends on many factors including, but not limited to the following items:

  • The amount of available storage in both the utility batch and DBM1 address spaces
  • The utility that is running.
  • The type and number of other utilities that are running at the same time.
  • The specific combination of keywords and operands of all the utilities that are running
Recommendation: If you receive a failure that you suspect is caused by running a utility on a list that is too large, divide your list into smaller lists and run the utility or utilities in separate job steps on the smaller lists until they run successfully.