Installation and Configuration Best Practices › Configuration › Split Files

Split Files

Use split files to reduce the time needed to create additional content-specific files, or generation data groups (GDGs), containing data from a defined interval (a single day or parts of a day).

Business Value:

This eliminates the need to run EXTRACTs after the dump process, reduces I/O and CPU usage, and generally provides better performance for managing your SMF data. In addition, you can select only the records that meet the criteria you specify.

Additional Considerations:

The following are the additional considerations for split files.

• Access split file GDGs through the split file index, and use fully qualified file names.
• Assembler language programs can use the $SPINDEX macro, located in CASFMAC library, to map the split file index records.
• We do not recommend accessing the generation zero split file because it may be incomplete.