Best options for polling a file

[pascal.jacquemain@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Hello,

Imagine a file where records are created by jobs and are processed by other
jobs. The processing jobs do not access all records but only those with the
right key field. There are several solutions to get data from the file and
to "wake up" the processing job.

- Use of data queue or message queue to tell the processing job to "wake
up". While not a bad idea, it means programs that create records in the file
must also call a program to generate the data queue message or the message.
This may be done via a trigger but this adds processing time every time a
record is created.

- Use a delay wait method (in this case, waiting 0.1 second each time) and
check with SETLL or CHAIN that at least 1 record is awaiting processing.
This is a "lighter" option than the above on the jobs that create data but
can lead to unnecessary use of CPU or I/O (although while running on our
system, the CPU and I/O of jobs that have nothing to process are very low if
not negligible).

Can you make comments or are there other more desirable methods? (We do not
want to use either data queues or MQ queues or message queues to store the
temporary data).

Thanks

Pascal

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