RE: This way or that? -- MIDRANGE-L

IMHO, multiple member files have their place. This is not one of them. It 
sounds like the system was designed on a machine that had more disk than 
processor power. If you have the resources (time and programming staff), I 
would change the file to one member and add the WS id to the file and make 
it part of the key. If not, then I would add the member at the beginning of 
each session. The overhead in maintain the access path for all of those 
members it seems would be way more than adding the members. Not to mention 
the backup time required.

I hope it helps.

-----Original Message-----
From:   Joel Fritz [SMTP:JFritz@sharperimage.com]
Sent:   Friday, June 09, 2000 5:34 PM
To:     'MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com'
Subject:        RE: This way or that?

Not knowing exactly how the file is used, I can't be sure I'm 100% right,
but...

Adding and removing file members is not a real resource hog.

Is a given member used by anyone else but the job for which it was created?

If not, it sounds like a real good candidate for crtdupobj (with wild card)
in qtemp, or a library that's private to the job. That's assuming the file
and its logicals have a name that will work that way.


-----Original Message-----
From: Graap, Ken [mailto:keg@exchange.gasco.com]
Sent: Friday, June 09, 2000 1:30 PM
To: 'Midrange'
Subject: This way or that?


Question -

We have a process that adds a member (member name=device name) to a file
which is then used as a work file for the current job. Once a member has
been added it is never cleared or removed.

At any time there may be as many as 500 members in this file and each 
member
may contain several thousand records (1,000 - 50,000).

There are also several logical views defined over this file. The first view
has 6 formats and three other views have one each. So at any one time there
can be up to 2000 indexes all defined with Access Path Maint *IMMED.

When everything is added up, this 'work file' takes up 259MB of disk space
for data and 814MB of disk space for indexes. A total of over 1GB.

The developer who designed this process says that he doesn't remove these
file members when a user signs off  in order to avoid the overhead of 
adding
a member each day when a user starts an application session.

If you were designing this application to optimize the use of system
resources (disk utilization, program performance, backup recovery etc) 
would
you remove these work files daily and add new members when needed or would
you leave the work files in place as we are doing?

I'm looking forward to all your thoughts....

Kenneth

****************************************
Kenneth E. Graap
IBM Certified Specialist
AS/400 Professional
Network Administrator
NW Natural (Gas Services)
keg@nwnatural.com
Phone: 503-226-4211 x5537
FAX:    603-849-0591
****************************************


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