VSAM has been available for VSE users since 1973, when DOS/VS Release 28 became available. Today, it is estimated that over 90 percent of the data in VSE environments is managed by VSE/VSAM. The care and feeding of VSE/VSAM (the proper establishment of the VSAM environment and definition of the data sets and other objects within it) can pay immense rewards.

In the mid-1980s, IBM established a performance benchmarking center in Dallas, and the Swami was the first technical staff member of that organization. In his performance and benchmarking experience, most of the performance benefit possible from optimum tuning of batch and on-line workloads comes from simple tuning of VSAM data sets and the program access specifications (JCL, CICS FCT options, etc.) for them.

If you wanted to know how to do this, you've found the right place!

• Basic VSAM terminology and jargon
• The structure of data components
• The structure of index components