Re: Environment variables and IASP's on the I-Series

[Evan Harris <spanner@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Jim

Nice to see you on this list (at last !)

You might want to think about what level of the application the 
variables are for before you decide on the most appropriate medium. I 
am guessing that environment variables will be sharable across 
multiple database instances as from what I understand they live at 
the file system/operating system level. If the data that you want to 
pass around is application or database specific (which relates to 
your use of IASP's) then you may not want to be able share the data 
at this level.

When I have this kind of requirement I like to have a user space or a 
data area where I can store the data in a structure way and use a 
service program or RTV command to return the data I need when I need 
it. this makes it easy to change the container holding the data or 
the structure of the data without affecting any programs accessing 
the data because the access to the required data has been 
externalised. This works well if you are doing something like 
maintaining state or allowing multiple jobs to see what the status of 
a process is.

If the data is per-job related this may be too much overhead and a 
table might be better, but table records have a habit of hanging 
around whereas a user space created in QTEMP automatically goes away 
at end of job, which can be kind of handy.

Some food for thought anyway.

Regards
Evan Harris

At 12:06 p.m. 22/09/2005, you wrote:
> We're considering holding some information in environment variables for
> use on our I-Series instead of passing such data between programs.
>
> Firstly, I don't see a lot of reference about environment variables. Is
> there any reason why they are not often used?
>
> Secondly, I'm curious where the variables live. We utilize multiple
> IASP's - and I'm trying to find out if each IASP gets it's own
> environment space or if such variables are held in SysSpace.
>
> Any help would be appreciated.
>
> James P. Wiant
> jim.wiant@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
>
> 'Imagination is more important than knowledge'
> Albert Einstein