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In 1989 I rewrote the nightly batch update process for the law firm
which employed me.  The rewrite dramatically improved the stability and
reliability of the process AND cut the run time by 85%, from 5-6 hours
to 45 minutes.  I am sure the RPG process you are discussing could have
been cut to 8-10 hours through GOOD, EFFICIENT design and coding.

Every legacy system has some processes (Order Entry perhaps, or
Inventory month-end) that are poorly designed and have morphed over the
years into poorly performing, inefficient monsters.  The fact that both
you and your boss are so willing to credit SQL for the improvement
rather than intelligent programming makes me wonder.  Imaging if the
programmer who wrote the original program you replaced had been the one
to do the SQL program.  Would the result have been a 90% improvement in
processing time?

Don't allow that one process improvement to set the expectations for
what can be achieved.

>>> Rick.Chevalier@americredit.com 01/09/03 01:30PM >>>
Vern,

A PEX trace was run on our batch process and some issues with the
current
application came to light.  We are working on addressing them in their
RPG,
CL and DDS formats.  After almost every issue identified was a long
term
recommendation that involved SQL.  This is the main reason for the
interest
in SQL.  It didn't help that I converted an RPG process that was
running for
3 days (no that's not a typo and yes some of the RPG code was
inefficient)
to a single SQL statement that runs in 6 - 8 hours.  Our manager is
pretty
sold on the idea of moving to SQL for the database design and access. 
I
wanted to get a head start on identifying some of the things we might
encounter along the way.

Rick

 -----Original Message-----
From:   Vern Hamberg [mailto:vhamberg@centerfieldtechnology.com] 
Sent:   Thursday, January 09, 2003 1:37 PM
To:     Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject:        RE: SQL for performance (overnight batch jobs)

Reeve, I agree. Recommending SQL as one-size-fits-all solution for 
performance is wrong-headed, IMO. It depends--on the scope of the
change, 
on whether logic is completely rewritten, as Bruce (I think) alluded to
in 
his successful example, on other things.

The parallelism advantage only works if you have multiple processors
with 
SMP installed. So it depends.

The IO paging advantages that IBM mentions will not occur unless access
is 
very sequential (or memory is very large relative to the amount of data
to 
be read in) - Expert Cache (*CALC for paging) determines IO request
sizes, 
and very random access had better not do much more than the 4k or 16k 
pages. *FIXED will not do larger than 16k IO requests, AFAIK.

My boss, a former IBMer heavily involved in database, has said that you
may 
gain 20% in one area, only to lose 40% in another. You've got to be
careful 
with these blanket recommendations.

These recommendations might be just right for the original posting
party. 
We don't know enough about the situation. But a good PEX profile trace

could identify bottlenecks in RPG code and point at ways to improve
things 
without throwing the whole thing over and starting fresh. Or maybe they
are 
recommending a middle ground.

Regards

Vern

At 12:27 PM 1/9/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>An important function of batch jobs (large and/or overnight) is
>providing batch control totals and other tools accountants (the fact
>that "tools" and "accountants" are contiguous in this sentence should
>not be construed as a political statement) rely on to demonstrate
system
>integrity.  In addition, it's a useful form of work management
(unless
>you like printing 35,000 invoices interactively).
>
>The revenue accounting environment in the transportation/logistics
>environment is complex: there are pricing, discounting, revenue
split,
>revenue allocation, and fuel price fluctuations driving every invoice
in
>a high-volume (100/day-20,000/day) environment.
>
>Real-time processing is the solution for just about everything but
>accounting.  Cutoff dates (period end, etc.) are an integral part of
the
>"measure and compare" nature of accountancy.
>
>I don't understand how the use of SQL could improve performance in an
>otherwise well-designed (proper use of LF's, etc.) batch application.
>SQL may offer some flexibility with complex joins (for reporting, of
>course) but that's about all I can think of.
>
>-reeve


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