What is IMS Fast Path Solution Pack?

IMS is IBM®'s premier transaction and hierarchical database management system. It is the product-of-choice for critical online operational applications and data in which support for high availability, performance, capacity, integrity, and low cost are key requirements. IMS manages the world's most mission-critical data and is integral to today's resurgence of mainframe usage.

The total cost of ownership (TCO) of any database management system (DBMS) is comprised of more than software and hardware costs. To determine the total cost, you must factor in scalability, reliability, systems management, the cost of database professionals to program, support, and administer the DBMS, and the cost of the computing resources that are required to operate the DBMS.

IBM IMS Tools further lower IMS’s TCO by enabling personnel who have less IMS and mainframe experience to perform common tasks, while freeing more experienced personnel to focus on complex or strategic tasks. All these benefits can be realized by implementing IBM’s IMS Fast Path Solution Pack.

IMS Fast Path Solution Pack provides an effective and efficient approach for managing your data entry databases (DEDBs) quickly and accurately. IMS Fast Path Solution Pack can contribute to reducing the overall total cost of ownership of IMS and, in turn, improve the return on investment (ROI).

IMS Fast Path Solution Pack provides the following solutions to simplify management of DEDBs:

  • A database monitoring solution that helps to keep databases in optimal condition by automating database monitoring tasks.
  • A database reorganization solution that supports the following reorganization capabilities:
    • The online reorganization capability manages space of online areas with no downtime.
    • The offline reorganization capability reorganizes areas faster with a short maintenance batch window.
    • The integrated reorganization capability automates reorganizations and extensions of online areas.
    • The online database restructuring capability restructures online areas with minimal impact to database availability.
  • A database tuning solution that helps DBAs analyze IMS databases and determine the most effective database organization and definition.

Subsections:

Database monitoring solution

Highly skilled IT resources are vital for keeping databases in optimal condition. Competitive businesses cannot afford for their best people to be tied up with repetitive database maintenance tasks.

The database monitoring solution of IMS Fast Path Solution Pack is the key to database administration that not only lightens DBAs' work load but also keeps databases safe. The database monitoring solution helps your DBAs better manage your databases.

Automating database monitoring
DBAs assess database conditions by analyzing various reports that are generated by the tools or programs used in their workshops.

With IMS Fast Path Solution Pack's database monitoring solution, database statistics are collected automatically during DBA's daily or weekly operations, and are accumulated in a repository. The accumulated statistics are automatically evaluated from various perspectives, and DBAs are alerted if DEDB areas are in exceptional conditions. Because only the DEDB areas that need a DBA's attention are alerted, even if your DBAs manage hundreds or thousands of DEDB areas, DBAs can easily identify the DEDB areas that require attention.

Viewing database conditions graphically
Database trends are an important factor in making database maintenance and migration plans for optimal database performance. However, DBAs require time, skill, knowledge, and experience to track the trends of databases, assess database statistics, and maintain historical data.

With IMS Fast Path Solution Pack's database monitoring solution, DBAs can use web browsers to view interactive charts that show historical data and database trends. Through this graphical web interface, DBAs can also view the structure and the source code of the databases.

This graphical web interface helps DBAs acknowledge the database conditions at a glance. Less experienced DBAs can also use the interface to learn the structure and relationships between databases.

The database monitoring solution relieves the day-to-day burden of collecting, analyzing, and managing statistics by automating the monitoring of database health.

Database reorganization solution

Keeping IMS databases reorganized helps ensure that your IMS applications perform at their optimal levels. IMS Fast Path Solution Pack can help reduce the time that is required to keep databases in top condition, while enhancing DBAs' ability to manage IMS databases.

The database reorganization solution reduces the amount of time databases are unavailable by supporting an efficient reorganization process, and helps your DBAs reorganize databases quickly without affecting IMS transactions and applications.

The database reorganization solution covers all the necessary reorganization procedures (unload, reload, initialize, build and synchronize secondary indexes, pointer check, and image copy), improves DBA productivity through a single-step reorganization process, and eliminates the need for operator intervention after a reorganization finishes.

IMS Fast Path Solution Pack supports the following capabilities for database reorganization.

Online reorganization without downtime
Many businesses are moving toward 24x7 operations; to do so, key databases must be available around the clock. Taking systems offline for maintenance can affect your business. In today's market, systems must be highly available because the cost of outages can be high.

The online reorganization capability provides two methods for managing the space of online areas: reorganize the free space of DEDBs and extend the space of DEDBs. Both methods provide users with full access to the database during data reorganization, improve overall database availability, and prevent planned downtime. DBAs can schedule when to reorganize online databases by predefining an online reorganization window, which saves DBA resources, and increases database availability.

Integrated reorganization capability for automation
The integrated reorganization capability provides an integrated database reorganization infrastructure for DEDBs. It analyzes databases, evaluates database statuses against policies, and, when necessary, reorganizes or extends areas automatically.
With this capability, DBAs can:
  • Achieve fast database reorganization and extension without manual intervention.
  • Detect database problems before they negatively affect business.
  • Customize and define policies to ensure that each database continues to satisfy its business requirements.
  • Easily access all the resources they need from central repositories.
The integrated reorganization capability provides an end-to-end database reorganization solution for DBAs.
Offline reorganization with high performance methods
The offline reorganization capability provides an integrated database reorganization infrastructure for DEDBs.

When DBAs detect a space shortage problem in a database, they must maintain the database before the database negatively affects business. Maintenance tasks include determining the database definitions or changing the randomizer, unloading the data, and then reloading the data to apply the change.

By applying the integrated database reorganization infrastructure and the high performance I/O technique of IMS Fast Path Solution Pack, the CPU time and elapsed time that is required for these tasks is reduced. DBAs can use simple JCL statements that follow simple format. Therefore, DBAs can simplify database maintenance tasks and efficiently perform such tasks with little database downtime.

Online database restructuring capability
As the amount of data in a DEDB grows, DBAs might consider how they can change the structure of the DEDB to better maintain the DEDB. IMS Fast Path Solution Pack provides the capability to change the structure of online database. This capability helps DBAs restructure online DEDB or areas with minimal impact to database availability. By using this utility, DBAs can change DBD descriptions, randomizing modules, and segment edit/compression routines while the DEDB is online.

Database tuning solution

The mainframe computer handles mission-critical tasks. As a result, DEDBs keep expanding day by day. As database records and segments in an area increase, the space utilization of the area becomes inefficient to the point that tuning is required. A poorly tuned DEDB area might require excessive physical I/Os to read root segments and database records.

Tuning a database often involves significant and time-consuming database administration tasks such as tuning the randomizer, increasing the amount of free space, changing the database structure, or adding areas.

The tuning utility provided in IMS Fast Path Solution Pack facilitates multiple iterations of the database tuning process, which allows your DBAs to select physical database attributes that meet the performance and space utilization requirements, and keep your business running at optimal efficiency.

The database tuning solution helps to keep your databases optimized for the best performance and enables your DBAs to reorganize databases efficiently by allowing them to do complex tasks with small work load.