IDCAMS VERIFY IDC3351 VSAM OPEN RETURN CODE IS 168

Resolving The Problem

Remove the VERIFY parameter from the IDCAMS SYSIN DD. It is not valid in Concurrent Processing.
The file is only Opened via CICS, this request in a batch job will not be successful and was code for non-concurrent setups.

Background information:
When a VSAM file is opened by a job in the output mode, a flag in the VSAM catalog called “open-for-output” gets set to ‘ON’. This flag does not get turned off until the job ends successfully i.e. until the job closes the file normally. Or in case we are editing the file manually in file-aid, the flag gets set when we open the file and gets turned off when we close it.
But say the job goes down halfway through the update process or our TSO session expires before we could close the file. The “open-for-output” flag remains turned on.

When next time a job/user tries to open the file for output, the file manager requests the catalog to turn on the flag. But the flag is already on!! So it guesses that some other job might have opened the file.
It issues a GRS (Global resource serialization) enqueue on the file to find that out.
If the file is not open anywhere else, it comes to know that it was not closed properly during its last use and its time for some catalog cleanup.

VSAM VERIFY is a record management macro like get or put. In our case, the open processing issues an implicit verify against the file. This can be confirmed by the IEC161I type warning messages (RC of 56 and 62) in the sysout. The verify macro will compare the ICF catalog information with the physical VSAM cluster. It starts reading the VSAM dataset CI by CI, starting with the High Used RBA. It compares HURBA value, number of index levels, system time-stamp and many other fields. If the verify is not successful, it will issue a warning message with a return code of 116 (X’74’).