Control Area-VSAM

Control area A CA is formed by two or more CIs put together into fixed-length contiguous areas of direct access storage. A VSAM data set is ...

Control area

A CA is formed by two or more CIs put together into fixed-length contiguous areas of direct access storage. A VSAM data set is composed of one or more CAs. VSAM files are extended in units of CAs.

For ESDS and RRDS clusters, control areas are filled with control intervals that contain records.  For KSDS clusters, some of the control intervals in each control area may consist entirely of free space that can be used for dataset expansion.

The minimum size of a CA is one track.

The maximum size of a CA is one Cylinder.