We hope everyone enjoyed a relaxing and warm holiday season and is off to a great start to the New Year.  With all that is happening in the VSE marketplace, we sure are ready and excited for a busy 2009 .

Enjoy this week's iTip and enjoy your week!

z/IPMon^® - Now with Response Time Reporting!
Experience a Live VSE System Running z/IPMon Today!

Your wishes have been granted, TCP/IP users! z/IPMon, the only full function performance and problem manager for your critical VSE TCP/IP systems, is now reporting on response time, either by application or by host. This useful information immediately shows any degradation in your users' interaction with the system to help you spot a performance problem.

With z/IPMon, you can even go back in time with the exclusive Retrospect™ feature and finally replay past TCP/IP activity and watch the response time as it happened in the past.  You simply change the date and time fields in z/IPMon to a previous point in time and z/IPMon will reload and display the data as it occurred.  So when your boss wants to know what happened, you can go back in time and tell him - without buying a Delorean!

Log On to a Live VSE System with z/IPMon to SEE What You've Been Missing!

View our Video Demo today to get a feel for how it works!

Download a FREE - yes, we said FREE - trial of z/IPMon

Understanding Your TCP/IP System - A White Paper

This Week's iTip!

Easy Data Extraction

Do your customers ever have a need to request a simple query where they supply the name of the field they want to see at execution time?

Here is a simple way to access and extract the data from the record.

Set up a simple data dictionary containing the field name, field offset in the record (where the first byte in the record is offset zero) and field type (small integer, integer, double integer, character, etc.).  This could be an internal table in WORKING-STORAGE, a DB2 table or a VSAM KSDS file.

Define a work area like this that redefines your record area:

01  RECORD-WORK-AREA                     REDEFINES xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.

           03  FILLER    OCCURS 0 TO nn1 TIMES DEPENDING ON RECORD-OFFSET
                             SET SET  SET PIC X(1).

           03  FIELD-CHARACTER                         PIC X(nn2).

           03  FILLER                                         REDEFINES FIELD-CHARACTER.

           05  FIELD-SMALL-INTEGER                    PIC S9(4) COMP.

           05  FILLER                                         PIC X(nn3).

           03  FILLER                                         REDEFINES FIELD-CHARACTER.

           05  FIELD-INTEGER                              PIC S9(9) COMP.

           05  FILLER                                         PIC X(nn4).

           03  FILLER                                         REDEFINES FIELD-CHARACTER.

           05  FIELD-DOUBLE-INTEGER                  PIC S9(18) COMP.

           05  FILLER                                         PIC X(nn5).

Define RECORD-OFFSET somewhere in WORKING-STORAGE as a PIC S9(9) COMP field.

Do a lookup in your data dictionary for the field name supplied by the customer.  Move the associated field offset to RECORD-OFFSET.  Then, depending on the field-type, you can move the appropriate field from the RECORD-WORK-AREA to wherever you what to use it.

Notes:

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx is the name of your record area that we are redefining.          

nn1 is the maximum size of your record.

nn2 is the size of the largest character field in your record.

nn3 is nn2 – 2.

nn4 is nn2 – 4.

nn5 is nn2 – 8.

Migrate Your VSE 3.x System
Before It's Too Late
With Help from illustro - the VSE Experts!

• Over 20 years of Experience with VSE Migrations. Our staff has been helping VSE customers all around the world with their migration needs for 2 decades.
• Unmatched Expertise - illustro's professionals have a wide range of expert knowledge and skills. That's why IBM turns to us to provide VSE education and even to speak at their technical conferences.
• 100% Success Rate with Migrations - NEVER Failed! Every one of our customers are available as a reference. We offer a 100% satisfaction guaranteed.
• Non-invasive/Reduced Expenses - Our team can complete portions of the migration on our site so the impact on your environment is minimized. Remote access to our system allows you to test your new system setup
• Costs are Capped - We will scope your migration project to take everything into account, and provide a proposal with a fixed fee. This means we will accomplish the migration regardless of the number of hours required, guaranteed!
• Proven Methodology - illustro's iMove^TM  Project Method for Migrations embodies 2 decades of experience to ensure nothing is forgotten and the process is streamlined.
• Entire Project or Assistance - Some of our customers just don't have any time out from their busy day-to-day to focus on a migration project, and ask for us to do the entire project. Others just want some assistance to ensure best practices are used and to ensure success. 
• On Site Cutover - One of our system engineers will be onsite on the day you plan production cutover, and will stay until all issues are resolved. We're there in the trenches with you.

We Want to Hear From YOU!