Re: Using Members within a PF

A company policy may be to keep 10 years of financial data online. One option
is to partition transactional data files into members, perhaps one member for
each fiscal year because all maintenance and reporting is on a fiscal year
basis only.

You could use transaction dates to filter records rather than using members,
but queries, file copying, and backups require more processing and elapsed time
under that approach.

It really takes some extra plumbing to support the use of multiple
members. Whether the extra plumbing is worth the effort may be
questionable, but I'll go with in the extra plumbing in order to gain
processing efficiencies.


What are examples of extra plumbing? I created a Web portal that enables users
to select "Work Areas" prior to drilling down menu trees. When applications
are launched from a menu they call a common program during an initialization
step which automatically performs member overrides for a given Work Area and
Application ID. A database file is used to define the file overrides for a
give Work Area and Application ID.

ODBC and JDBC clients can also call the program (passing Work Area and
Application ID as constants) to automatically perform member overrides for them.

Nathan M. Andelin


----- Original Message ----
From: "rob@xxxxxxxxx" <rob@xxxxxxxxx>
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, July 10, 2007 8:22:26 AM
Subject: RE: Using Members within a PF

I normally shy away from multiple member files. I guess I just don't like
having to do a OVRDBF to specify which member when something similar to
that could simply be part of the key. About the only time I ever use a
multi member file anymore is for something like:
CRTPF SPOOL RCDLEN(150) MAXMBRS(*NOMAX)
CPYSPLF ... to said file into a particular member
Repeat as necessary
Send off to IBM.

That being said I rarely even do that since I normally use iNav to drag
and drop to the desktop (or some directory). Then I zip those up and send
those off.

Rob Berendt