Distributing the load across SORTWORK files

[Guy Werry]

John,
 
My world is Hp-Ux and before that MPE-ix, but I think the advice would still apply.
 
The ideal way to do something like this is to write to and INDEXED SUBFILE, which has the index in the order that you require.
 
That way the records are "inserted" (written) in the order of the index.  A quiz report can then just read the resulting subfile without having to do the sort at all.  Yes, the process that creates the subfile is slow, but the report is very fast and the overall load on the system is less.
 
Failing that, if you don't have indexed subfiles available I would seriously consider putting another file definition into the dictionary.
 
Other than that, a system sort utility would be a good idea.
 
Guy L. Werry
Senior Systems Analyst
Hudson Bay Mining & Smelting Co., Limited. 

-----Original Message-----
From: powerh-l-bounces+guy.werry=hbms.ca at lists.sowder.com [mailto:powerh-l-bounces+guy.werry=hbms.ca at lists.sowder.com]On Behalf Of John Stires
Sent: Wednesday, May 17, 2006 2:01 PM
To: powerh-l at lists.sowder.com
Subject: Distributing the load across SORTWORK files


We are doing a very large sort in quiz.  It consistently runs for a time and then dies.  We have 10 SORTWORK files defined, but only one seems to be used.  It grows to several million blocks before the process dies.  The others are virtually untouched.
 
We are running OpenVMS V6.2 with PowerHouse version 7.10E6.
 
Does anyone have a suggestion on how to distribute the sort load across multiple SORTWORK files.
 
 
Thanks in advance for any help any of you can offer on this.
 
John Stires

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