Re: This way or that?

[MacWheel99@xxxxxxx]

From Al Macintyre

I love these educational discussions, although I am not competent to fully 
participate in them all.

Kenneth, 

We have a similar situation with BPCS ... Users transactions go into a member 
named after their work station sharing the external description of the file 
to which the data will ultimately end up in.  I have lost track of how many 
files do this, but it is systemic to the whole package.  

Of our almost 50 current users, perhaps 30 at most need access to any given 
file with this phenomena, but since we name work stations after departmental 
locations, and have gone through a variation in remote connection protocols, 
there are these member names dating back to years ago development no longer 
needed & many of them are from the original SSA developers, coming with the 
package for work station addresses we never had.  

Most of our files have the 30 we need & 100 members we do not need.

These files also have many logicals ... I think the most I have seen for any 
one file is 100.  

We did have a conversation with SSA tech support regarding the records soft 
coded for deletion & hard coded that are never removed & learned that in 
really large files (our largest is like 2 million records), that are being 
used vigorously during the day, there is a performance hit searching for a 
place to add records if deleted spaces are to be reused ... the upshot of 
this discussion is we left that alone, & run a large scale file reorg to 
remove deleted records approx weekly.

In my to-do list of programming assignments is "Garbage Incineration" since 
we have learned that BPCS 405 CD System Parameters for History Retention not 
withstanding, some files are NEVER purged by the system, so for example in 
addition to under 1,000 valid customer orders we have over 5,000 historical 
filled orders we want to get rid of. 

If you too are on BPCS, there is a 3rd party solution to clean up all of 
this, called BPCS LITE from UPI, which also addresses the issue of the ERP 
creating files for every conceivable client contingency.

James

In an earlier flirtation with "Garbage Incineration" I removed individual 
lines from files where the contents we no longer needed & discovered that I 
had caused a disaster ... most of the files use multi-field index access in 
which the last field is a sequence # ... some programs do not track what all 
they need to find.

Read next sequence # --- successful read? --- left justified fields still the 
same baby? --- Ok, process that & loop

Except by me erasing individual lines in the middle, it would go from line 
0001 to line 0050 & because 0002 was missing, that was a failed access, and 
it quit right there, so I need to study the application & see if I need to 
resequence the sequence #s when I remove garbage from the middle.

I do not know precisely what is going on with BOM, but a collegue at a 
neighbor company also using BPCS warned me NOT to use IBM tools to reorg that 
file ... they had done so & it trashed their BOM, related to the use of 
record numbers for access that IBM reorg not easily notice ... you HAVE to 
use the BOM reorg tools that come with the package, which incidentally 
default to non-compliant Y2K dates.

Joel

I use similar standards to SSA approach in some of my programs, but at end of 
CL after successful processing, I clear the member, on the theory that some 
disk space will be reclaimed & when I am noodling around with DSPFD it is 
almost easy to see candidates for manual deletion.

In BPCS ... One person can work at some work station address, then sign off, 
then someone else sign on at the same work station & get into the same batch, 
because they are keyed on environment & application & work station, not user.

We once had a scenario with a hardware failure in mid batch, in which the 
hardware could not be rapidly resolved & the user had spent all day keying 
into this unfinished task & pleading with IT to save their bacon.  Part of 
our recovery was to rename work members so another work station could recover 
the job.

If I was designing Ken's scenario, I would include several pieces of software 
that SSA neglected.

1. Run the member names against our WRKSYSCFG valid addresses & if the member 
has no active records & the member name has no corresponding valid work 
station, then delete that member.

2. Any member names that exist that are empty & have not been used in some 
reasonable time period like 1 month, erase them also ... allow for folks on 
vacation.

3. Also run BPCS security against AS/400 security & get rid of stuff on 
people no longer working for our company ... you can add BPCS security for 
new people but you cannot purge the old folks, other than to take them off of 
AS/400 security.

Now SSA does have some software to recover batch from a user session that 
abnormally terminated, which we need to use occasionally.

I am on BPCS_L & all of my points have come up in past threads there, 
although some not recently.

Al Macintyre  ©¿©
http://www.cen-elec.com MIS Manager Programmer & Computer Janitor
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