Mainframe batch tool needed to override sys date & time?

Brad Polhemus · Posted: Wed Dec 03, 2008 3:24 am

Does something like this exist?

Thanks in advance!!

dick scherrer · Posted: Wed Dec 03, 2008 3:41 am

Hello Brad and welcome to the forum,

Back around y2k there were several offerings that claimed to do this. The stories i heard varied from "not too bad" to "we'd sure have been better off without it". What my group did was to set up an entire clone mainframe that was set to whatever date was needed.

Some of the others may have a more definitive reply about their experience using such products.

Also, i deleted the other post with the same subject - we do one to a customer

Robert Sample · Posted: Wed Dec 03, 2008 5:01 am

We used a product called HourGlass until last year for overriding system dates. I believe it was from Princeton Softech, which I seem to recall got bought by IBM; a quick Google search finds the product still available. It installed easily with a system hook and allowed you to determine the date (and time I believe?) used for the batch job.

Gnanas N · Posted: Wed Dec 03, 2008 2:02 pm

Hi,

We use TIC TOC tool from IBM.

skkp2006 · Posted: Thu Dec 04, 2008 9:35 am

For CICS there is
CICS Time Machine may be something similar is there for Batch processing.....

Syam

Peter Poole · New User Joined: 07 Jan 2009 Posts: 50 Location: Scotland

Hourglass is pretty good, it works fine for batch and CICS and also caters for DB2.

Probably worth mentioning that Hourglass works by intercepting SVC calls and does not automatically handle code which issues STCK calls (STore ClocK, ie: go ask the hardware clock). Hourglass handles that by having a replacement module for some components - like DB2 - where an STCK call is replaced by an SVC that Hourglass can then handle.

That means it does not automatically work for some 4GLs such as Gener/ol or Ideal. Not sure if other products - like TicToc - have same shortfall, but if you're looking at products it's probably worth going through a checklist of all the executables you want to fiddle the time for with the vendor...

Cheers.