Designing Inquisitor requests

When constructing statements for the Inquisitor SYSIN file, try to combine all selection and exclusion criteria to form a single SCANDIR request. A single Inquisitor request will not scan a VTOC or a library more than once.

It can be difficult to formulate a system scan into a single CATALOG request, meaning that when the CATALOG operand is used, multiple requests are coded. Ensure that no data set will be scanned by more than one SCANDIR CATALOG request by excluding as many data set name patterns from each request as necessary. Data set name exclusions may not be necessary if all CATALOG search selection masks represent disjoint parts of the name space.

The example shown here uses the XDA operand to prevent SYS1.LINKLIB from being scanned more than once:

  SCANDIR DA(SYS1.**) CATALOG
  SCANDIR DA(SYS%.LINKLIB) XDA(SYS1.LINKLIB) CATALOG

As well as using the selection and exclusion facilities to ensure completeness, they can also be used to improve performance and efficiency by excluding DASD volumes which do not contain program libraries. Although a volume with no program libraries can be scanned quickly, processing duration might be reduced if such volumes can be excluded from an Inquisitor scan.

For example, volumes that only contain databases, or temporary data sets, do not have any files suitable for Inquisitor processing, but the VTOCs of those volumes are still read unless excluded by the appropriate selection criteria.

To illustrate this further, consider a system with these DASD subsystem usage elements:

System platform: Non-SMS and storage group SYSTEM.
Work pool: Storage group TEMP containing temporary and short-lived (two days) permanent files.
TSO: Storage groups TSOONE and TSOTWO.
Non-DB application: Non-SMS and storage groups BATCH1 and BATCH2.
Databases: Non-SMS volumes DBA001 to DBA099 and SMS storage groups DB01, DB02, and DB03.

The scanning of this configuration is to be carried out with the following assumptions:

No need for data from libraries that do not exist for more than two days.
No program libraries on database volumes.
Applications combine their program libraries and non-database files.
TSO users can have program libraries.
Management requires information regarding all potentially permanent executable software.

To acquire Inquisitor data from all useful sources without processing volumes more than once, and without processing irrelevant volumes, you can specify multiple requests in a single Inquisitor run. For example:

  SCANDIR SG(SYSTEM)
  SCANDIR SG(TSO*)
  SCANDIR SG(BATCH*)
  SCANDIR NONSMS XVOL(DB*)

This can be consolidated into a single request giving the same result. For example:

SCANDIR SG(SYSTEM TSO* BATCH*) NONSMS XVOL (DB*)