Re: Reuse vs. Reorg

You've gotten a good responses already, Dave, and for the most part they lean towards using REUSEDLT. Let me give you two practical disadvantage to reusing deleted records.

First, you can't recover deleted records if they're reused. I don't worry about that too much, because I would journal a file if I'm worried about recovering deleted data.

If you do a DSPPFM on a file that does not reuse deleted records and then position to the bottom of the file, you will see the records most recently added. This is a minor issue is the majority of cases, but occasionally you have a file where it's very advantageous to be able to quickly see the last record(s) added. This isn't to say you could do it in other ways (timestamps, for example, or a journal), but the DSPPFM technique is quick and easy and has proven very helpful in specific situations.

That being said, I like REUSEDLT because I don't have to do RGZPFM. But I thought I'd bring these issues to your attention.

Joe

We have a file that is somewhat dynamic. Records are generated, they are kept for awhile, some are deleted, others are generated, and so on. The deleted records increases by about 100,000 per day. We run a reorg once a week to get the deleted records back. I had thought about changing the file to reuse deleted records to minimize the need to do reorgs. Is there any downside to this? My boss thought that if the default for files was *NO then there might be a reason that we wouldn't want to do it. This isn't a file where we would want/need to reactivate the deleted records. It would be easier to restore from a backup or just regenerate them. Thoughts?


Dave Parnin