Chapter 23: Further Reading

Batch Window Engineering: Job Scheduling, Critical Path Analysis, and the Math of Getting It All Done by 6am

IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler for z/OS: Managing the Workload (SC23-7110) The definitive reference for TWS/OPC. Chapters on application definition, dependency management, resource modeling, and recovery are directly relevant to this chapter's scheduling concepts. Pay particular attention to the sections on special resources and workstation open intervals.
z/OS MVS JCL Reference (SA23-1385) The DISP parameter (section on dataset disposition), JOB statement COND parameter, and the IF/THEN/ELSE/ENDIF construct are essential for understanding how JCL implements the conditional execution logic discussed in Section 23.4.
z/OS MVS Planning: Workload Management (SA38-0689) Chapter on batch service classes explains how WLM allocates CPU and I/O priority to batch work — the mechanism that determines whether your throughput math assumptions hold in practice.
DB2 12 for z/OS: Performance Monitoring and Tuning Guide (SC27-8850) Sections on batch performance, lock contention analysis, and commit frequency optimization. The IFCID trace records described here are the data source for the DB2 timing analysis in Section 23.3.
DFSORT Application Programming Guide (SC23-6878) If your critical path includes sort steps (it usually does), understanding DFSORT's memory allocation, work dataset sizing, and parallel sort capabilities is essential. The DYNALLOC option for automatic work dataset allocation can eliminate B37 abends in sort steps.

BMC Control-M for z/OS Administration Guide Control-M's resource management, cross-system dependency handling, and self-healing capabilities. The "Smart Folder" concept maps to the job stream architecture discussed in Section 23.5.
Broadcom CA-7 Workload Automation Reference CA-7's requirement network, virtual resource management, and cross-platform scheduling. The SCHID (schedule ID) concept is particularly relevant for monthly cycle management like Pinnacle's case study.

Bob Rogers, "z/OS Batch Processing" (IBM Redbooks, SG24-6698) Covers batch processing from the z/OS perspective — initiator management, JES2/JES3 processing, SMF recording, and batch performance measurement. Older but the fundamentals haven't changed.
Frank Kyne et al., "System Programmer's Guide to: z/OS System Logger" (IBM Redbooks, SG24-6898) Relevant for understanding how the z/OS logger supports checkpoint and recovery operations, particularly in a sysplex environment where batch jobs may span multiple LPARs.
Paolo Bruni et al., "DB2 11 for z/OS: Performance Topics" (IBM Redbooks, SG24-8222) The batch-specific sections cover commit frequency analysis, lock avoidance, and partition-parallel processing — all directly applicable to Section 23.5's DB2 concurrency discussion.
Frederick P. Brooks Jr., "The Mythical Man-Month" (Addison-Wesley, 1975/1995) Not a mainframe book, but Brooks's discussion of the critical path method in software project scheduling (Chapter 14, "Hatching a Catastrophe") applies perfectly to batch window analysis. The insight that adding resources doesn't linearly reduce elapsed time is the same principle at work in batch parallelization.

James E. Kelley and Morgan R. Walker, "Critical-Path Planning and Scheduling" (Proceedings of the Eastern Joint Computer Conference, 1959) The original CPM paper. If you want to understand where the critical path concept came from, this paper describes its application to construction scheduling — a domain with remarkable parallels to batch window engineering (dependencies, resource constraints, hard deadlines).
Project Management Institute, "A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide)" Chapter 6 (Schedule Management) covers CPM, PERT, and resource-constrained scheduling. The mathematical foundations are identical to batch window analysis — nodes, edges, forward pass, backward pass, slack calculation.

Merv Adrian et al., "System Management Facility (SMF)" (IBM Redbooks, SG24-6263) SMF record types 14, 15 (dataset activity), 30 (job accounting), and 101/102 (DB2 accounting) are the data sources for the throughput analysis described in Section 23.3. Understanding how to extract and interpret these records is essential for batch window engineering.
IBM z/OS RMF User's Guide (SC28-6897) RMF reports on I/O activity, CPU utilization by service class, and channel path utilization provide the system-level view needed to identify resource bottlenecks.

Arcati Mainframe Yearbook (annual publication, arcati.com) Annual survey of mainframe shops including batch processing practices, window sizes, and challenges. Useful for benchmarking your batch window against industry norms.
Planet Mainframe (planetmainframe.com) — Batch Processing articles Practitioner-written articles on batch optimization, scheduler comparison, and modernization strategies. The site's "Batch Modernization" series is particularly relevant for shops considering the hybrid approaches discussed in Section 23.6 Strategy 6.

Chapter 1: z/OS Foundations — Job lifecycle, initiator allocation, JES processing
Chapter 4: Dataset Management — GDG architecture, catalog operations, DISP parameter
Chapter 5: Workload Manager — Service classes for batch, CPU dispatching priority
Chapter 6: DB2 Fundamentals — Lock management, isolation levels, commit processing
Chapter 12: JCL Advanced Topics — Conditional execution, COND parameter, IF/THEN/ELSE
Chapter 24: Batch Program Design — Individual program design for restartability, checkpoint/restart patterns, commit frequency strategies (the "trees" to this chapter's "forest")
Chapter 25: Parallel Processing — Multi-threading in COBOL, DB2 parallel query, sysplex-wide batch distribution
Chapter 26: Disaster Recovery — DR considerations for the batch window, site failover, data currency