Thanks Mark. Neil sent me an email with a link to an article that shows how a job can alert you (email) when certain conditions are met in the Howmessy report.
 
http://www.robelle.com/tips/remote-dba.html <http://www.robelle.com/tips/remote-dba.html> 
 
I wrote a job based on the job shown in the article and will have the job check for elongation greater than 2.
 
Thanks again. Jay


________________________________

From: Mark Landin [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tue 4/12/2005 7:26 AM
To: Jay Willis
Cc: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] What to look for in a Howmessy report...



Elongation. An elongation of 1 is optimal. Any elongation above 1
indicates that you are, on the average, doing more I/O than is
necessary when you go traversing that particular chain, because the
records that comprise that particular chain are not packed together in
the same blocks.

When you do a DETPACK, which puts all the records on a particular
chain into as few blocks as possible (thus minimizing I/O) you have to
pick which path to pack along. Pick the one you want to minimize I/O's
on, which will typically, but not always, be your primary path.
Optimizing along one path will often inflate elongation in the other
paths, so choose wisely.


On Apr 12, 2005 9:17 AM, Jay Willis <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> ...that would indicate that a dataset needs to be re-packed?
>
> I would have sent this question to Robelle, except that we dropped support.
> Budget cuts. I know that doing a detpack will reduce the highwater mark, but
> are there any other stats from the report that indicate that performance
> would in increased with a detpack? We (3-man, 1-woman shop) want to come up
> with a job that possibly would run every night to run Howmessy for important
> databases and send an alert (email) if such-and-such a stat was getting away
> from optimal and that a detpack or capacity change needed to be done. I
> understand when a dataset's capacity needs to be increased, but not when a
> detpack needs to be done (except when the highwater mark of a detail would
> suggest it). We'd rather not do a detpack on a regular basis - just when one
> is indicated.
>
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