CICS: GETMAIN Vs. Load Top Differences

In CICS, there are two types of storages – Temporary and Permanent. However, GETMAIN command acquires temporary storage during execution of the program and releases (Temporary). On the other hand, the permanent storage is fixed.

GETMAIN

You can issue this command to store data within transaction. User storage acquired by EXEC CICS GETMAIN without SHARED option

The areas where you need storage are:

Transaction Work Area (TWA)
COMMAREA in an EXEC CICS LINK or EXEC CICS XCTL
TIOA in an EXEC CICS LINK or EXEC CICS XCTL with INPUTMSG
Program storage

CICS: GETMAIN Vs. Load Top Differences — Photo by Michael Burrows on Pexels.com

Sharing data across transactions:

Temporary Storage
Common Work Area (CWA)
Terminal user area (TUA)
COMMAREA in a RETURN
TIOA in a RETURN with INPUTMSG
Display screen
Intra-partition transient data
Your own files
User storage acquired by GETMAIN with SHARED option

LOAD

Load command is used to load a program of independently compiled and has an entry in PPT. Load makes a copy of an application program, table, or map available to the invoking task. If the program is defined with RELOAD=NO, it is fetched from the LIBRARY concatenation where it resides only if there is not a copy already in main storage.

If the program is defined with RELOAD=YES, a new copy is always fetched from the LIBRARY concatenation.