Re: BOM900 -- BPCS-L

>From Al Macintyre

>  From:    DrissH@Eicon.com (Driss Hajjaji)
>  
>  Did some body run regularly BOM900? 

We run it with our weekly reorgs but to be truthful sometimes we skip a week 
... it probably actually gets run only 2-3 times a month.

> What the benefit to run this program?

longish essay by Al at end of this chain of brief thoughts

>  and is it easy to automate?

We take a menu option & it runs batch mode off JOBQ for about an hour

>  We are Running BPCS 6.00.02 C/S Cumulative Marsh 98 on plate-form AS/400
>  S30.

We are 405 CD mixed mode on AS/436
  
>  Regards.
>  
>  Driss Hajjaji
>  
>  Tel. 514-832 3423

When we converted from BPCS/36 to BPCS 405 CD in the Spring of 1998, our 
consultants advised us that this should be run regularly ... there was no 
discussion as to why or what it does exactly.

When we were on BPCS/36 we ran it about once a month, in combination with 
BOM905, which SSA has combined into one step on 405 ... we also ran a reorg 
that we had written vs. FRT routings, to eliminate soft deleted records & do 
not know 405 situation ie. have a need for a list of files vs. where do the 
soft deletions exit, so that we can see which files SSA has not made 
provision for soft deletions to exit, so that we should write our own 
arrangements.

I have been assuming, without digging into any documentation, that BOM900 on 
405 CD does conceptually the same stuff as BOM900 and BOM905 on S/36.

One of them got rid of the deleted records, so that we kept the file no 
larger than it needed to be.  From a performance stand point, software that 
has to wade through deleted records to get at valid records, can be a drag.

The other one rearranged the physical file so that the actual records were in 
keyed sequence.  On BPCS/36 alternate index equivalent of logicals were not 
used as heavily, the physical file was indexed, and this reorg had a major 
performance impact that may be of no value on OS/400, unless some fool has 
written software to access the physical instead of a logical, which I doubt.

With OS/400 logicals accessing files any which way, I do not see the S/36 
advantage of rearranging the physical file so that the records are in the 
actual sequence of the main index, however removal of soft deleted is 
important for disk space consumption & general file access performance.

There are several questions here ... does the current SSA software clean out 
the soft deleteds of MBM during BOM900 ... my file statistics tend to imply 
to me that they do, since we had a sudden appearance of hard deleteds there a 
few weeks ago after I ran BOM900 after a lapse of 3 weeks ... so I figured 
that my co-workers had been busy purging obsolete parts ... their work made 
them soft deleted, then BOM900 catch up took the records from soft deleted to 
hard deleted, then SYS120 bought back the disk space.  

Next question is the pace of your company deleting old BOM & thus the 
importance to productivity of getting rid of the deleted records from a 
performance perspective.

If your BOM is fairly stable or if you never have time to delete obsolete 
stuff, then running this every few months may be the logical timing.

Al Macintyre
+---
| This is the BPCS Users Mailing List!
| To submit a new message, send your mail to BPCS-L@midrange.com.
| To subscribe to this list send email to BPCS-L-SUB@midrange.com.
| To unsubscribe from this list send email to BPCS-L-UNSUB@midrange.com.
| Questions should be directed to the list owner: dasmussen@aol.com
+---