Re: "Reuse Deleted Records" in System Catalog

On Thu, Jan 16, 2020 at 11:34 AM Vernon Hamberg
<vhamberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

The system catalogs would not have that, as they are very SQL-related,
and this attribute is specific to IBM i.

That rationale is very understandable, but it's not that useful as a
heuristic for predicting what information is *actually* provided in
the catalogs. TABLE_TYPE, FILE_TYPE, SELECT_OMIT, and IASP_NUMBER are
all IBM-i-specific and would not make sense on other SQL-enabled
systems. (Even if you could find a non-IBM platform which has
something analogous to IASPs, chances are they wouldn't *call* it
IASPs. And in any case, this is utterly irrelevant to *SQL*.)

Even something like NUMBER_DELETED_ROWS isn't really relevant to SQL,
and the fact that it's available (via SQL) on the i makes it
oh-so-tantalizingly close to having something which tells you whether
those rows can be reused or not.

Gord, no matter what anyone says, there is nothing wrong with using
DSPFFD to *OUTFILE. I mean, it's definitely worth taking a look into
the catalogs; and worth asking here in case you missed something; and
you did both of those things. But even if you hadn't checked, and gone
straight to DSPFFD instead, I wouldn't fault you for that.

John Y.