Re: Turning back QDATE -- MIDRANGE-L

Roger Boucher <RBoucher@stanpac.com> wrote:

>Sorry!!!  I meant turning forward and then turning back...
>so either set of issues is highly relevant to me.  Thank
>you for catching that.

Aha! At first I was thinking you might not be too badly off. If you turn
the date back and then forward again to the current date you might just get
away without any problems. But turning the clock futurewards is not a good
idea on your production system. It happened to me once on a live system
after we had removed the front panel to repair the on/off switch.
Unbeknownst to us at the time, there was a feature in the 9406 that caused
it to IPL with a future date after disconnecting and reconnecting the
panel. I know a few people were bitten by this.

The immediate problem was that hundreds of scheduled jobs had been
submitted both by the IBM job scheduler and J.D. Edwards' Sleeper as they
tried to catch up with the "backlog", particularly the JDE product which
will submit 365 instances of a daily job if you set the clock forward 1
year. You run JDE, don't you? Do you have any other job scheduler, e.g.
Robot, and how would that be affected?

After you sort out that mess you find that you have QHST history that never
goes away because it never expires. The same goes for problem logs. You
also have journal entries with future dates waiting to get mixed in with,
and become indistinguishable from, your genuine future journal entries. You
also have strange creation, last used, and possibly last saved/restored
dates on objects that could affect your tape management system and
subsequent backups.

After you set the clock back you have to check that your various job
schedulers are back in synch. and the right jobs are primed to go. You may
also have problems with applications that may have stored the current date
in various places and closed out periods etc. You have to have a complete
understanding of how each application tracks its dates to be sure you've
covered that area.

Like Al I'm really amazed that your software provider won't let you have a
temporary licence to conduct essential testing. I'm sure it's not J.D.
Edwards because I've always found them to be very co-operative in these
circumstances. I too think we should know who it is so (a) we can avoid
buying their software and (b) it might put some pressure on them to be more
reasonable.

Dave Kahn, ABB Steward Ltd.


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