How to identify the dictionaries in an IDMS Central Version

Products

• IDMS

Issue/Introduction

This document describes how to identify what dictionaries exist in an IDMS CV and what their names are.

Environment

CA IDMS, all supported releases.

Resolution

The first thing you will need is the output of a LOOK of the global DMCL for your CV.
You can do this online with the LOOK task code but the output can be quite large so for the purposes of this exercise, it would be better to use the IDMSLOOK batch utility.

Find all the AREAs in the LOOK output with a second level qualifier of DDLDML.
Each one of these is the physical area representing a dictionary.
For example, this output represents a dictionary which is defined in segment APPLDICT:

                              Page      Low         High      Page           
     Area Name            Shr Group     Page        Page      Size    DDNAME 
----------------------    --- -----  ----------  ----------  ------  --------
                                                                             
APPLDICT.DDLDML                   0      60,001      62,000   4,276  DICTDB  
APPLDICT.DDLDCLOD                 0      70,001      70,500   4,276  DLODDB  

Now you need to determine what DICTNAME to use to address this dictionary.
It is possible to use the segment name (in this case APPLDICT) as a DICTNAME.

However it is better to use the DBNAME including the dictionary segment, because the program being executed against the dictionary may also need to access other AREAs that are not necessarily defined in the dictionary segment.
Two examples of this are an IDMS catalog or an Endevor CCDB which might be in your CV depending upon the products you use.

In the example here, there is the following DBNAME:

DBNAME is APPLDB  match on subschema is OPTIONAL                              
             Include SEGMENT ---> APPLDICT                          7 BIND COUNT
             Include SEGMENT ---> CCDB                              0 BIND COUNT
             Include SEGMENT ---> SYSMSG                            0 BIND COUNT
             Include SEGMENT ---> SYSSQL   SQL Segment              0 BIND COUNT

In this case, it would be better to use APPLDB as the DICTNAME for this dictionary.
In most practical situations in the case of a dictionary, the DBNAME will be the same as the SEGMENT name so it won't matter what you use.
They are different in this example only to more clearly illustrate the difference.

In a normal IDMS CV, the following dictionaries should be present because they would have been created at install:
SYSTEM (must be there).
SYSDIRL - repository for IDMS source entities used by IDMS itself.
TOOLDICT - used by former DBMS Inc toolkit component products.
ASFDICT - obsolete and most likely not being used at your site but is included for reasons of upward compatibility.
APPLDICT - A sample user defined dictionary created at install time.

Additional Information

Dictionaries and Runtime Environments