North Carolina Department of Public Safety

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TECHNICAL SERVICES

Functions in this area are basically classified into two (2) major areas: Data Base Administration and Technical Support (consisting of 13 employees, 10 full-time and 3 contractual).

Data Base Administration

The Data Base Administration Team designs, maintains, protects, monitors and tunes the largest, most complex database in North Carolina State Government. Available 24-hours per day, seven days per week, the DBA Team helps manage an extremely high volume of daily transactions (averaging 500,000+) in the production database. In addition, the team manages seven (7) full-sized test databases, all with a minimum of interruption to the Department’s user community or the staff of application developers.

Database administration tasks are handled daily by skilled analysts utilizing robust, automated procedures that guarantee fast, accurate and reliable maintenance of more than 642 tables and indexes in each of 8 databases, totaling more than 5,100 DB2 objects. Great care is exercised in maintaining the constant synchronization of 3,000 -6,000 weekly data dictionary changes with all application development environments on both local and remote servers, as well as, mainframe platforms.

On-going research and statistical analysis of table growth increases the accuracy of tablespace sizing while ensuring the most efficient use of costly storage space. Diligent monitoring of production transactions, coupled with meticulous performance tuning of both objects and programs, has guaranteed the highest possible performance benefits for our users at the lowest cost per unit of work.

TECHNICAL SUPPORT FUNCTIONS

The Technical Support Team is primarily involved with the administration of the Department’s mainframe communications in such areas as:

CICS OPUS PRODUCTION

Monitor on-line and batch processing for response times, abends, loops and any adverse changes to the production system. This system consists of approximately 2000 daily batch jobs submitted through OPUS; 540 on-line transaction codes; 1,575 transaction types; 1,646 programs, maps, das modules and parameter cards; 1,887 copy library members; 637 JCL library members; 1,157 DBRM library members and 40 procedure library members. This team supports 3 (v2.2) CICS regions and 8 (v 3.3) CICS regions which includes maintaining transactions, maps and programs in all CICS regions. Also included in this area of responsibility is the adding of transactions to the Resource Control Table (RCT), which threads the connection to DB2; and add printers to existing CICS tables (of which we now have 2200 printers genned under VPS and CICS).

ZEKE (SCHEDULER)

Monitor and maintain approximately 360 scheduled OPUS, DBS and system batch jobs that run daily, weekly, and monthly by adding events, and rescheduling run times. Two schedules are maintained: One for production, the other for all our test systems.

COMPUTER BASED TRAINING (CBT)/OPUS

Maintain and install new releases of the on-line CBT system accessible to all DOC users for OPUS training.

ON-LINE HELP FACILITY (OHF)

All OPUS update transactions utilize this facility. As a result, all text files are backed-up on a daily basis.

RESOURCE ACCESS CONTROL FACILITY (RACF)

This is the mainframe security package used by all state agencies being served by the ITS mainframe. As of this writing, there are 15,764 userids within the RACF system for accessibility to various DOC systems; as well as, 355 users who have TSO/ISPF mainframe access for DBS, SAS and RMDS. This team also supports over 500 Security Administrators across the state in all areas of security.

OPUS SECURITY

This team provides the function as the Department System Security Administrator for all OPUS programs and profiles for the data dictionary (3DGEN).

DASD SUPPORT

Maintain space utilization for VSAM and flat files that reside on our private packs, system managed storage files, off-site backups and disaster recovery backups.

SOURCE CONTROL

Provide controls for programs through their life cycle (from the development phase to production implementation phase).

MISCELLANEOUS SUPPORT

Work with ITS in areas of changes and maintenance as it relates to hardware and software which may affect the way the Department does business. Support the Application Development, Quality Assurance, MIS staff, in general, and clients concerning the daily operation of the OPUS system.

Management Information Systems