Created by James Hurrell, last modified on Sep 01, 2020

Introduction

The CAST DB2 Analyzer does not support direct connections to a DB2 z/OS server and is instead delivered with a utility that provides the means to extract information related to database structure, types and routines from the DB2 system catalog and then save the results into flat files. These files will then form the input for the CAST DB2 Analyzer.

The extractor is delivered as a JCL file containing a sequence of JCL code. There are various different versions of the extractor, each dedicated to a specific version of DB2:

  • CAST_JCL_EXTRACT_FOR_DB2_V7-<version>.jcl (for DB2 z/OS v7)
  • CAST_JCL_EXTRACT_FOR_DB2_V8_V9-<version>.jcl (for DB2 z/OS v8 and v9)
  • CAST_JCL_EXTRACT_FOR_DB2_V10-<version>.jcl (for DB2 z/OS v10)
  • CAST_JCL_EXTRACT_FOR_DB2_V11-<version>.jcl (for DB2 z/OS v11)

The extractor JCL files can be sourced as follows:

  • Directly from the CAST AIC Portal web page
  • from root of your CAST installation folder
  • or can be sourced direct from CAST

See DB2 zOS extractor - installation and configuration for information about the installation procedure in a z/OS environment and Using the DB2 zOS extractor for information about executing the extractor.

DB2 z/OS extractor - description

The DB2 extractor contains four categories of steps. The first category, the second category, and the fourth category contain only one step each (STEP00, STEP01, and STEP26) whereas the third category contains 24 steps (STEP02 to STEP25).

  • Step STEP00 will reset all the generated files:

  • Step STEP01 creates a reference file containing information about the structure of the information that is extracted from the DB2 system catalog:

  • Steps STEP02 to STEP25 execute queries on the DB2 system catalog in order to produce information about database structure and specific DB2 objects. Each step uses one query and produces one result file.Each step invokes the DSNTIAUL utility and sends it an SQL query via the SYSIN DD card. All queries that are used in this JCL are in read-only access mode. The results are saved into the data set specified in the SYSREC00 DD card:

  • Step STEP26 generates a file with the number of rows of tables. This information is extracted from DB2 system catalog:

By default Step 26 of the DB2 z/OS extractor is set to output the raw file containing table size information with the name "CAST.DB2.TABROWS". However, the extractor JCL may have been manually modified and the output file may be named differently or, during the transfer to the Windows environment, the resulting file may be named differently - see Dataset names and MANIFEST in DB2 zOS extractor - installation and configuration which explains this is more detail. You can find out more information about how to use the raw table size data in XXL tables Quality Rules enablement.