<<This is how a former employer of mine (a software vendor) designed
their system.  But the problem they were solving was making the data
plant specific.  What they did was prefix the key value (say, the product
number, for instance) with a one character code that indicated which
plant the product number "belonged" to.  They had a special value for the
code (a zero, IIRC) which indicated that the record was for all plants.

To retrieve a record you prepended the plant code to the key value and
did the retrieval.  If you don't know the key value, or want all key
values for a specific plant code, then yes, you have to do a serial read
of the data set.>>


Why would you need a serial read of the detail set? I can see a serial
read of the automatic master to find all matching compound keys, followed
by chained reads of the detail. Of course, with the sorted-sequential
access being added to TurboIMAGE in 5.5X3, that reduces to a single step.

Steve