3 Chapter 3. Access to MVS data sets For Java, without specifically talking about z/OS, the most important data stores are files and relational databases. For access to relational databases (and even non-relational ones), the Java DataBase Connectivity (JDBC) APIs can be used in both an application server and a stand-alone environment. Libraries with classes and Beans are available for access to files. In a z/OS environment, however, there is a third important issue: access to MVSTM data sets. In the UNIX environment of z/OS one could perfectly live with the generic file access classes of Java to access files stored in the UNIX format in the HFS. In the z/OS environment, however, the usual way to store data is in MVS data sets. In this chapter we discuss how these MVS data sets can be accessed. We do not address JDBC or generic file access from Java because these topics are documented in numerous other places already. © Copyright IBM Corp. 2006. All rights reserved. 31