Michael J. Riley writes:

> I'm trying to eliminate 85,000+ duplicate records on our system.  I'm
> curious
>  if the RECNO (32-bit Integer) remains constant for the life of that record?
>
>  What I would like to do is create a file of RECNO's that we need to delete
> and
>  then use this file as input into a program to do a Delete (Direct). Is this
>  feasible? Does RECNO for a particular record stay the same today, tomorrow,
>  and two weeks from now?

Michael,

It took me a little while to understand what you were asking, but I eventually
deduced that RECNO is a data item in an IMAGE database.

If so, the answer is that no IMAGE database operation ever alters the values
of data in any way. The information that is altered (chain heads, pointers,
etc.) is not visible to you when you are simply putting, getting, updating, or
deleting information from the database.

This complete separation works to your benefit. Data values are never modified
by structural reorganizations of the database. And infrastructural information
such as pointers are modified only as they need to be when new data values are
entered or deleted from the database -- but you never see any of that.

While RECNO, in your case, may sound like a database "record number", it
probably was never intended to mean that by the person who designed the
database. Rather, it would be better to think of RECNO as a "case number" or
"employee id number" or some other such identifying indicator for each
specific data record, the same kind of thing that might have been written on
the tab of a folder that you would have found in an old-fashioned filing
cabinet.

Wirt Atmar