RE: Timestamp vs Date/time Decimal fields, Overhead in RPG programs...

George,

I hesitate to do this but I'm going to go ahead and add my .02 anyway.

While doing some SQL vs. native I/O benchmarks a few years ago we discovered incidentally that adding the %date BIF to convert a numeric field containing a date value to a date data type added 20 minutes to our processing. The test consisted of running over a few million records (don't remember the exact count now) and performing some simple calculations. While many shops don't routinely run batch processes over that many records it is very routine for us. As a result when needing to convert dates in a process that will run over a very large data set we avoid using the %Date BIF. If it is a interactive process or a small set of records using the %Date BIF is ok.

I have mentioned this before so searching the archives should bring up the conversation, and probably others about this topic.

Hope this helps.

Rick

-----Original Message-----
From: rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of George Lopez
Sent: Tuesday, March 16, 2010 5:05 PM
To: RPG programming on the IBM i / System i
Subject: Re: Timestamp vs Date/time Decimal fields, Overhead in RPG programs...

Thank you for the response. Now it is just a matter of deciding by my IT manager if the new database fields date/time should now all be timestamp or still the old decimal.

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