VARLEN vs "BLOCK" Storage -- MIDRANGE-L

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My manager is considering developing a storage algorithm to store a variable length text field in a 32K record.

He plans to using a unique key field with a "pointer" into the 32K record; in essance "packing" multiple fields into one 32K block.

I have suggest that a better method would be to define the text field as VARLEN will an allocated length.

0001.00      A          R TEST00
0002.00      A            TEXT       32000          VARLEN(100)
        ****************** End of data *************************

My manager is concerned by the amount of storage that my suggestion would use... to much DASD" (as defined by the DSPFD command).

Has anyone ever developed/used the "block" method?

What other comments would you have on either approach?

TIA

Michael Smith

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