Is there any information passed between ACF2 PRIMARY & ALT databases?

Products

• ACF2 - z/OS
• ACF2
• ACF2 - MISC

Issue/Introduction

Are the ACF2 PRIMARY and ALT databases completely separate? Does any information pass between them?

 

Environment

Release : 16.0

Component : ACF2 for z/OS

Resolution

There is no information that gets passed back and forth directly between the PRIMARY and ALT databases. Making adjustments via standard VSAM processing to the ALT databases while they are not active/in use will not impact the PRIMARY databases. Making changes to records in the ALT databases via TSO ACF or ACFBATCH will not impact the PRIMARY datasets.

The only way to "propagate" information between the PRIMARY and ALT databases is though backup processing. A backup is taken of the PRIMARY datasets into the backup flat files, then the GSO BACKUP record is used to have an additional procedure that runs (via the STRING parameter) which contains the IDCAMS commands necessary to DELETE and DEFINE the ALT databases, and then REPRO the backup flat files into the newly defined ALTs.