At 9:16 AM -0700 8/9/00, [log in to unmask] wrote:

>I don't think it is a GP issue since it is built in to Image.  They don't
>even need to know you have it turned on!!
>------------------------------------------------------------
>Not so, if the program was intelligently written for its time.  An
>intelligent program would have done a DBINFO mode 202 to have checked number
>of entries versus capacity to see if the new record to DBPUT would have
>room.  If there was no room the program would then report back to the user
>that the data set was full to avoid having transactions partially complete.
>
>However, with DDX turned on, you must use DBINFO mode 205 to check the max
>capacity versus number of entries, because the current capacity would equal
>number of entries, signifying potential failure.


This is correct. I inherited a software product originally written years
ago which does exactly this sort of checking. Only a week or two ago one of
our customers called to say that he had enabled DDX in some of the data
sets in our database, but that the software gave him a warning about
insufficient capacity. This is a real problem, not theoretical.

However, I don't see it as a serious problem because the software would
have returned the same warning if DDX had not been enabled. In either case,
the transaction is not committed, and the software behaves has it always
has. A failure to take advantage of a new feature is not necessarily to be
construed as a bug, especially considering that new features are carefully
designed to allow backward compatibility (at least, thank Goodness, in the
case of MPE!). In this light I would say that the original poster correct
in asserting that "it is [not] a GP issue...".

In general, users should feel fairly safe in enabling DDX in databases that
are shipped by third-party vendors. Even so, it would still be a good idea
to check.


Barry Lake                                 [log in to unmask]
Allegro Consultants, Inc.                  www.allegro.com
(408)252-2330