> not cause a problem.  Beware that if you add the sort to all
> three items
> below, that your performance on puts is going to slow way
> down if you have a
> large number of detail dataset entries.

Although, to keep things in perspective, it is probably fairly rare (as a
percentage of all accesses) to add new records to such a set, and *really*
rare to add a lot of them all at once. IOW, lots of DBPUTs, requiring the
update of several sorted chains, is probably not something that these
applications do all day every day.

Speaking of the applications, Bill specifically noted that
  "The programs that use this Data set are supplied by a third party and I
have no access to them."
Things like switching to KSAM or doing retrievals on new fields added to the
set are not options.

Steve


Steve Dirickson   WestWin Consulting
[log in to unmask]   (360) 598-6111