Why Are ICF Catalogs Breaking?
ICF catalog management code dates back to 1985 and has been stable for many years. Recently, a requirement for greater shared access integrity and performance improvements has led to significant code changes. Perhaps that’s the reason ICF catalogs seem to be failing now more than ever. Hardly a week goes by without a story of a major catalog failure surfacing. Often, it’s accompanied with details about how several hours were necessary to correct the problem— typically due to lack of staff expertise in how to perform a catalog recovery, or the lack of a plan or utility software to affect the recovery. The number of complaints reported in the IBMLink database shows the frequency and severity of catalog-related problems. Often, catalogs simply aren’t kept clean. Because it’s believed they never break, little attention is given to diagnostics across the breadth of the catalog environment. Typically, the available diagnostics are run only when a known problem exists, with little thought giv
