Re: query killing system

[MacWheel99@xxxxxxx]

There may be an issue with respect to how likely this might happen.

I have used incidents like this as an excuse to do some education with some
people.
They are a bit chagrined & very happy for me to show them how to avoid THEM
doing this again in the future & then when someone else does it, sometimes
they are the educators & we end up with more & more of our personnel knowing
how to use Query/400 effectively.

I have a document on our 400 = Query FAQ & Techniques
As co-workers figure out neat things that can be done, we add to our document
What it is (some meaningful name that we can search on)
Examples of doing it (priority is to show people how to get it to work)
Specific query you can go look at when you copying technique for your first
time
How it works (sometimes understanding neat ideas lead us to other things to
try out)

Some of the stuff is old hat to some of our old hands
but it is new neat stuff in the eyes of other query creators
so we build enthusiasm for getting the most bang for the buck out of this
resource
Some day

It would be useful to know if there is a way to put a cap on the size of a
file created by either Query or anything to *OUTFILE ... as a programmer
experimenting with stuff, it could easily happen to me that I create
something big unintentionally because I not know in advance how large
something is going to be, but I would also want it to be easy to override the
cap via a pause for reply to error message, so we do not bomb programs that
do need a higher cap.

We see this in runaway RPG programs ... new program, testing, some bug, it is
writing to report to infinity, the program loop is eating CPU, the report
will be eating disks space.  Has that every happened to you ... it happens to
me several times a year.  I would like to have a cap on testing ... hey if
this exceeds some thresh hold, stop & ask me if I want to continue.

We have some legacy programs that generate humongous audit trails that no one
has time to study so we delete them ... they blow up the spool file before
they get done.

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