RE: How to treat obsolete information from a physical file

Inactive records should not be deleted. That said, the practice here, which is a hold over from the S/36 system's disk limitations, is to physically (as opposed to logically) delete customers.

Worse is that item numbers, as well as customer numbers, are re-cycled. Yesterday item #12345 might have been "Hershey's Candy Bar" and today it might be "Beef Jerky." While we maintain sales history files that are non-relational in that each record stores the significant data, such as customer name, type, etc., it makes going back in time to do important data mining questionable. Whenever we do attempt to do that over a long period, there is nearly always some snide comment about "Well, that can't be right. I thought the computer was supposed to be able to give us better information." To which I always respond, "Duh." (GIGO).

Jerry C. Adams
IBM System i Programmer/Analyst
--
B&W Wholesale
office: 615-995-7024
email: jerry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

-----Original Message-----
From: rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of David FOXWELL
Sent: Friday, November 06, 2009 5:17 AM
To: RPG programming on the IBM i / System i
Subject: How to treat obsolete information from a physical file

Hi,

I'd like to know how you are treating such records, for example, a client that is no longer with you. In our client file, the client would be flagged as being no longer active, but never deleted. The trouble is, this has led to us creating logical files that omit these inactive records and that is a problem for the programs that use SQL.

Now, my RPG program needs to list clients in a subfile where the user types part of a name and/or town. If I don't use the OMIT logical, then my program must read all active and inactive clients then do the same with the address.

Any thoughts will be appreciated.