View DBKEY - COBOL subroutine that translates dbkey in S9(8) format to a "friendly dbkey" in pp,ppp,ppp:lll (page/line number) format (includes logic to properly handle dbkeys over 8.5 million, which appear as negative numbers in COBOL).  Download both DBKEY programs.

View DBKEY2 - COBOL subroutine that translates a "friendly dbkey" (page:line) back to a COBOL S9(8) number.   Download both DBKEY programs.  

View SMPESYNC.TXT - SMPE JCL and CULPRIT show you how to keep your SMPE target libraries in sync with your run-time load libraries.

IDMSERRD.ZIP - Documentation and subroutine for IDMSERRD COBOL subroutine that prints and formats user-friendly error messages for the common IDMS ERROR-STATUS code.  Download the accompanying "Plain English Definitive Guide to Quickly Resolving IDMS Program Problems."

Issue #1 - Page Ranges

Download  Utility of the Month - Issue #1 -74kb - I will show you how to build a utility to help you get a grasp on your IDMS page ranges. I will give you a series of programs that will build a graph of all your database areas (it takes three pages). This "graph" looks a lot like a Norton Disk Doctor or Speed Disk report. Each character on the chart represents a 1000 pages; each line (of up to 100 characters) on the chart represents 100,000 pages. The size of each area is indicated by a letter of the alphabet or a symbol. This makes it very easy to see where your biggest areas lie, and where the page-ranges gaps are. Reports are created that backup the information on the graph. However, in this first issue, I have to lay the ground work with some cool foundational programs and subroutines that must first be installed. These routines are powerful and will be used in many of my future utilities. They let you do things in COBOL that many people never knew was possible - or never thought about doing. Issue #2 will contain the actual page-range utilities. 

    UTIL01.EXE is a self-extracting zip file.  After downloading to your PC, execute it to expand it to the 7 programs and the one .PDF documentation file.  

    Web Page with UTIL01.EXE - detailed file listing  

    Each issue requires Adobe Acrobat Reader to view the .PDF file documentation.    Available for FREE download from
http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/acrobat/readstep.html

Issue #2 - Page Range Graph

Download  Utility of the Month - Issue #2 -106kb -

        Issue #2 completes the "Page-Graph" Utility begun in Issue 1. To see an example of the final results, you can view this web page: 
        View web page with sample colorized "PAGE-GRAPH" 

        UTIL02.EXE is a self-extracting zip file.  After downloading to your PC, execute it to expand it to the 4 COBOL programs (with JCL and SAS), 1 Assembler, 4 Assembler Macros, 1 JCL file, and the one .PDF documentation file.

    Web Page with UTIL02.EXE - detailed file listing  

Issue #3 - Related Areas

Download  Utility of the Month - Issue #3 - 96kb -

       This utility shows you all areas related to a specified area-name, record-name, or set-name (i.e. it explodes all the cross-area pointers until it cannot find any more related areas). 

        UTIL03.EXE is a self-extracting zip file.  After downloading to your PC, execute it to expand it to the 3 COBOL programs, JCL files, and the one .PDF documentation file.

Web Page with UTIL03.EXE - detailed file listing  

Issue #4 - Userid Security Reports

Download  Utility of the Month - Issue #4 - 96kb -

       This utility builds one main report (and four supplemental reports) showing a list of userids with data merged from RACF, multiple CVs, the IDMS system catalog for each CV, and multiple user dictionaries for each CV.

        UTIL03.EXE is a self-extracting zip file.  After downloading to your PC, execute it to expand it to the 4 COBOL programs, 5 JCL files, and the one .PDF documentation file.

Web Page with UTIL04.EXE - detailed file listing