1.8. Choosing a VSAM data set type

During the application development process, the application programmer needs to make decisions about the data model. Among these decisions, we have data organization, function, type of access, performance, and recovery tools you need. VSAM has several organizations and different ways for accessing your data. How to choose the one for your application is discussed here.

Before you select a particular VSAM organization, you need answer the following questions:

  • What is the main purpose of your data set? Does it look more like a log, a database, or an inventory?

  • Do you need to access data by a key field in sequential or direct mode?

  • Do you need to access the records in sequence, skip sequential, randomly, or all ...

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