Re: Deleting logical files - was - RE: What is really the level check

[MacWheel99@xxxxxxx]

Perhaps you can advise on what is a bad thing & my clean up priority.

We have some files that have what I considered to be an excess number of
ingredients ... hundreds of members, hundreds of logicals, more than one
format.

We are on BPCS which does a real poor job of providing for the end of life of
records, so I have been busy identifying stuff we no longer need & deleting
it ... like Gen Led Journals posted years ago, Customer Orders filled months
ago, Notes for entities (customers orders items etc.) that do not exist any
more, while in other cases I merely identify suspects for human action, such
as raw material that we have on hand that is needed for customer parts that
we have not had any orders for in years.

There is also the shameful reality that the SOFTWARE to run our BPCS eats
more disk space than the DATA.

At present my thinking is that members that have not been used in eons, or
named after work station addresses we not have any more (with allowance for
SPECIALLY named members that are application sensitive) is a bad thing,
especially when more than 32 of them on a physical file get in the way of
adding yet another logical.

So are
lots of members a bad thing?
multiple formats a bad thing?

By bad thing, I mean resource hog.

Also reality check ... when we delete a bunch of records in a file, that does
not inherently save any disk space, because the file has grown to a certain
size.
We also need to review whether it makes sense to downsize it.

>  Access paths are a good thing!
>
>  There is a myth in the AS/400 community that is no longer true.  That is:
>  Access paths (logical files) on a file are resource intensive, have a
>  negative impact on performance, and should only be used where absolutely
>  necessary.
>
>  This is no longer true in today's environment on the AS/400!
>
>  This myth stems from the S/38 and was the guideline that IBM was giving
>  customers at that time.  The Rochester development lab began to change the
>  algorithms for access path maintenance in Version 2 of OS/400 and finished
>  the task in V3R1.  Access paths (logical files) are no longer the
>  resource/performance hog they used to be on the S/38.

MacWheel99@aol.com (Alister Wm Macintyre) (Al Mac)