When VSAM RLS is used outside of CICS or DFSMStvs, the applications do not have the transactional recovery environment. In most cases, this makes read/write data sharing not feasible.

A non-CICS application other than DFSMStvs is permitted to open a recoverable data set in RLS mode only for input. VSAM RLS provides the necessary record-level locking to provide read-with-integrity (if requested) for the non-CICS application. This functionality lets multiple CICS applications have the data set open for read and write RLS access. CICS provides the necessary transactional recovery for the writes to the recoverable data set. Concurrently, non-CICS applications outside DFSMStvs can have the data set open for read RLS access.