RE: VARLEN vs. "BLOCK" Storage

The varlen field only uses 2 bytes + the length of the data.  How long will
your pointer be?  Bet ya it is more than two bytes.  DSPPFD show the max
length avail.  I/O buffers allocate the entire length for the record and
blank fill the buffer.  This only uses storage for records in use, not
stored on the disk.

Christopher K. Bipes      mailto:ChrisB@Cross-Check.com
Operations & Network Mgr  mailto:Chris_Bipes@Yahoo.com
CrossCheck, Inc.          http://www.cross-check.com
6119 State Farm Drive     Phone: 707 586-0551 x 1102
Rohnert Park CA  94928    Fax: 707 586-1884
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Smith [mailto:msmith@telapex.com]
Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2001 5:14 AM
To: MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com
Subject: VARLEN vs. "BLOCK" Storage


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 essence "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).
 
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