RE: Stupid question of the century

Alan Shore wrote:

Hi guys
I've just been asked the following question by my boss's boss
Is there anyway to add new fields (columns) "on the fly" to an existing
file, without having an exclusive lock on that file.
In other words, the file is still being used while the field is added
I know that chgpf is out of the question (unless someone proves me wrong).
I know that SQL is also out of the question (ALTER TABLE x ADD EXTRAFIELD
DEC(7, 2) NOT NULL DEFAULT 0) - again unless someone proves me wrong
If anyone knows of any way, any language, any procedure, any function to
achieve this, please drop me a line.

If you use ALTER TABLE, it will get an exclusive lock of the entire file
for the duration of the operation, period. There is no workaround I
know of for ALTER TABLE's exclusive locking, because sooner or later the
same thing has to be done -- the DB has to add a column (aka field) to a
table (aka file) and I don't think there are non-exclusive
implementations, file-wide, of such a function on i.

As for the recompile issue, to achieve the boss' goals, the answer is to
re-write everything in dynamic SQL. However, this is not obviously a
good idea. Your company's mileage may vary though.


Larry Loen
www.applicationperformancegroup.com