Data set (IBM)

In IBM mainframe systems (including IBM System/360) data is not stored as unstructured streams of bytes (i.e. files in modern POSIX systems) but as records (see also Record-oriented filesystems on Wikipedia). A data set is an organization of multiple records.

There seem to be two ways of organizing data sets:

• Basic Sequential Access Method (BSAM)
• Indexed Sequential Access Method (ISAM)

Is this of any relevance to us?