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Work With PTF, Collection Services and Other IBM i 7.5 Hidden Gems: Part 4

From the WRKPTF command, an increased user profile maximum size limit and enhanced Collection Services, Dawn May continues her series on hidden IBM i 7.5 gems

In this post, I’ll continue reviewing hidden gems found in the 7.5 release.

Work With PTF 

The Work with PTF (WRKPTF) command is now part of the base OS. The command allows you to work with PTFs for a selected product; you can specify the product name, or use the *SELECT option to choose from a list of products. You can work with all PTFs, PTFs in save files, PTFs on order and PTFs with cover letters.

The WRKPTF command previously shipped in the IBM System Manager (5770SM1) product, which has been withdrawn. Additionally, other commands from 5770SM1 are now included in the base OS. The complete list is found in the Memo to Users.

While WRKPTF used to be in 5770SM1, it’s a useful command even if you don’t use the other related commands. The information displayed by WRKPTF is similar to that of DSPPTF.

User Profile Maximum Size Limit Increased 

In my blog post from April 2021, When Does a User Profile Becomes a Bottleneck?, I wrote about the maximum number of entries that can be stored in a user profile. In 7.5, this limit is increased from 50 million to 200 million. While this is a good increase on the upper limit, I still recommend knowing if you have user profiles with a large number of entries by using the Print Profile Internals (PRTPRFINT) command.

Speaking of the PRTPRFINT command, this command is also enhanced in the 7.5 release. The default value for the Percent Full (PCTFULL) parameter changed to 89.90 as opposed to the prior default of 99.9. In addition, PRTPRFINT now displays the percentage full statistics by ASP; if the user profile has entries for objects that exist in an independent ASP, the report will show percentage by ASP.

Collection Services: Additional Metrics 

Like other releases, IBM further enhanced Collection Services to collect additional performance metrics. There are two new categories of metrics, one that enables the collection of external storage metrics from IBM Spectrum Virtualize and another that collects topology and partition placement information from the hypervisor. These categories are part of the default *STANDARDP collection profile, so just upgrading to 7.5 will result in the collection of additional metrics (if applicable to your environment). IBM did not document new files for these metrics, so I suspect that iDoctor is required to review/analyze this data.

By default, additional metrics are also collected for the *SQL (SQL Plan Cache) category. The QAPMSQLPC file contains these additional metrics. This Collection Services data can be useful for additional insights into SQE query performance.

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