Re: BPCS perform & warm fuzzy thinking

from Al Macintyre on BPCS 405 CD mixed green screen mode with hopefully some 
relevant comments.

Sandy said

>    I'm also in the process of loading the latest PTF's for the AS/400 
>  operating system we are using (V4R2M0).  I had heard there were PTF's for 
SQL 
>      that may also help the performance.

We special ordered IBM PTFs for "data base performance" for our V4R3 mixed 
mode ... I will check at the office tomorrow & get you the specific IBM 
numbers, to help you find if they also exist for other versions.  This was 
separate & distinct from the OS/400 "PTF cum" package.  

We found out about these thanks to a lemon/400 hardware upgrade currently 
being fixed, where our AS/400 had been correcly sized by SSA questionairre, 
then a hardware upgrade to a supposedly better model unsized it ... ie. you 
cannot believe everything your IBM rep tells you, since the IBM data bases 
still do not talk to all the IBM partners.  We also found out that on-line 
Query/400 on "large" BPCS files (like 1/2 million to 1 million records per) 
are a bigger performance hit on 170 than 436, irrespective of sizing 
considerations.  So we need to figure out how to feed user selection criteria 
to a query to jobq at run time without changing the query.

BPCS comes with a ton of files for every application, including disk space 
consumption by stuff you might never ever use ... how can you tell what is 
safe to totally get rid of?
http://www.unbeatenpathintl.com/services.html - check out BPCS LITE

We use SYS120 regularly to clean out IBM deleted records from most BPCS 
members & IBM reorg for the few that SSA misses.  We copied many options from 
the BPCS reorg menu to our own reorg menu, resequenced into the reccommended 
sequence, along with some help lines regarding their usage, and interspersed 
with queries to print suspicious stuff before it gets purged.  We are using 
DSPFFD to a Query file technique explained on one of the 400 forums to 
identify which BPCS files need reorged & how urgently this needed ... like 10 
Meg disk space wasted before tonite's reorg.

>  From:    Cdoe@barton-instruments.com (Chick Doe)

> We have a nightly job that clears several of these files 
> (CLRPFM   ECHW,ECLW,ZEF etc). we learned about these the hard way 
> when we were having conflicts within the order entry system. 

There is also an infinity of what I call those "pesky work station members" 
... a work member is created in numerous files for data associated with each 
user ... in theory this should be cleared out when proper end-of job, but 
there has got to be a disk space hit when there is a member for every device 
name we ever had, including those that came from SSA that we never had.

> Would it make sense to also clear these files each evening 
> when the system is down and nobody is on it?

We have to be careful with enforcing nobody on it for dedicated tasks, since 
we have PCAnywhere Users dialing in from home & second shift doing random 
shop floor inquiry.

>  EWR
This file & a bunch of other EW* are regulars on SYS120 reorgs

>  ZQWAP
>  ZQWRP
>  ZQWSP
>  ZPD
SYS120 quits around VLA & gets none of the Z files.

>  If these are truly work files i see no harm in clearing them each evening. 

If you know for a fact that there are no problems awaiting resolution that 
might need into some work file .... I also CLRSPLF QEZJOBLOG each nite after 
backup

> does anybody have any cautions, concerns, or comments, 
> we are using version 6.04 in mixed mode. all applications are green screen 
> with the exception of order entry (uses the configurator) and CEA.

In addition to clearing work files, reorganizing data files that have deleted 
records, wiping out unwanted long since irrelevant work station areas, there 
is the issue of identifying obsolete records & figuring out how to remove 
them, and in our recent GJ novice adventure we discovered a number of GJW 
records with no year no period that would be there forever if I had not found 
them when trying to figure out a problem ... there could be garbage in other 
files worth rooting out & eliminating.
  
>  and finally, where or where might i find a discussion of topics such as 
this 
> within the SSA literature?

Start with SSA on-line document SSALOG00, your ERP consultants, search OSG (I 
have not actually seen it there but I have seen BPCS-L references to this 
reality), IBM web site for performance PTFs, IBM RedBook for BPCS, News/400 
guide to Managing AS/400 Performance, DS Reference Manual on BPCS, visit web 
sites of various consultants whose URLs you see on Sigs here (once upon a 
time Nex Gen had an on-line BPCSQL Tuning Guide - I don't remember the exact 
name), attend some BPCS User Conferences / Groups etc., subscribe to as many 
BPCS newsletters as you can, and ask more good questions on BPCS_L.

I am also interested in finding a list of what is truely a work file that 
could be cleared as opposed to reorganized, or even wiped out like those 
pesky work station areas that will be rebuilt as needed.

Rosalie@omnia.co.za writes:

> poor programming/design principles (or lack thereof) 
> e.g., a single spool file for each invoice - this is ridiculous

405 Cd does not have that sin, but we did change all IBM library printer 
defaults to not ask for forms alignment except at user choice when changing 
forms ... thus if we have multiple billing runs, with a spool file for each 
set of invoices, or some other kind of special forms, we can print them all 
continuous without operator action needed between spool files.  There is an 
IBM command to do that all at one time then another to make system default 
for new libraries like BMRs as they arrive.

Identifying such sins & knowing how best to deal with them is more than a 
full time job.

> From: novakg@ssax.com (Genyphyr Novak)
>  
>  As regards the BPCS programs being poorly written, I certainly hope you are
>  calling in BMRs to get the performance corrected, just as you would with 
any
>  other type of processing error.

Does this also apply to BPCS 405 CD?  CST900 comes to mind ... it took 45 
minutes on the 436 & currently takes 4 hours on our lemon/400.  I studied 
CST270 & found lots of programming techniques I could argue with.

Al Macintyre  ©¿©
http://www.cen-elec.com MIS Manager Programmer & Computer Janitor
http://www.whma.org = our nitch industry has a large committee searching for 
ErPdMes products right for WHM without work-arounds, which for many members 
resemble a snipe hunt - if you are in this software business & want to fix 
your product so it will not be mistaken for what your competition has been 
doing, then you might want to join our great game.

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