Re: trimming trailing blanks in spooled output...

[Al Mac <macwheel99@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

   I am beginning to have a concern about what I consider to be a series of
   adverse management decisions where I work.  My concerns are not just disk
   space, but also performance accessing reports when there are tens of
   thousands owned by the guy who runs end fiscal stuff.

   1. In end fiscal month we have reports that are like 100,000 pages in
   length, in which we print the total page only, then if some questions come
   up, we print selected sub-total pages, other chunks, but we NEVER print
   all 100,000..  Our auditors are on some system other than the 400 & they
   want copies of some of these end fiscal reports.  I am saying that most
   any e-mail system will choke on any of these reports, and an XL user is
   not going to be able to cope with 100,000 rows.

   2. They don't want to delete end fiscal reports from over a year ago, so
   now a considerable % of our disk space is this stuff.  I have been
   suggesting we come up with storing end fiscal reports for each fiscal
   month, end year, physical inventory, on a different set of CD Rom, because
   I believe CD-Rom are like the 8" diskettes of the past, they good for
   10-20 years, but other people here are pushing DVD and thumbnail drives,
   which I feel are here today, and no longer around in a couple years, due
   to rapid technology change.

   So for you learning from this:
   * What backup technology has reliability to store stuff off line to be
   retrieved many years later in usable form, at a time that we may now be on
   a different version of the OS, requiring some kind of upgrade to the
   backup to make it usable?
   * How long do you need what reports to be kept stored on any system, and
   how large are those reports?
   * Who will need to get copies of what reports on what other systems ...
   like customer vendor supply chain, auditor copies of some types of
   reports, government compliance reports, future audit like IRS.

   There is also the potential for waste in how data base files are
   structured.
   Fixed length is the norm there also.
   A file may have many fields that are unpopulated in most records, except
   for blanks or zeros.
   We can provide for files to eat more disk space as they grown, but need to
   take IT action to downsize files as they no longer need the extra disk
   space.

   -
   Al Macintyre
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AlMac
   http://www.ryze.com/go/Al9Mac
   BPCS/400 Computer Janitor ... see
   http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/stories/2002/11/08/bpcsDocSources.html