Mainframe Cobol - CICS or TSO?

[MarcLodge]

All,
At the site where I am working they have a Cobol program that is written in Cobol and runs under CICS. This program issues a CICS START command to run another Cobol program. Th 2nd program reads a large TSQ and processes until the end of the Q.

As this is effectively the same as running a batch TSO program being driven by files, I asked why the CICS approach was taken, rather than the more usual TSO, to be told that as the CICS region had a higher priority than TSO, it was faster.

Has anybody any experience of the performance differences between TSO and CICS, or any idea where I can obtain such information. I'm not disputing what I've been told, it just that I've never come across it being done like this before.

Thanks in advance for any info.

Marc

 

[kkitt]

Normally, your CICS region will have a higher priority since it is proceesing online type of transaction, were TSO handles Batch Transaction.

How often is the 1st program being run? Every hour, couple times a day, once a day, ect. This can lead you to why this may have also been setup.

I have done something similar in the past, had transactions that were being collected and updating the real time files as it went along. After so many transaction were collected then the new information was collected from the time of the previous run and then passed along to other processes ( manuf, ordering, shipping, ect...), which each had their own online applications, but just did not need real time information.

 

[MarcLodge]

kkitt,
The 1st program is kicked off once a day, but can be run more than that, although that isn't usually done.