Create a program to change the size of a file, reuse deleted records, and remove deleted records

This is the final part of the following trilogy:

1. Change the file's size and reuse deleted records
2. Remove the deleted records from the file
3. Create a program to perform both of the above

The earlier posts described how to manually perform the SQL statements needed. In this post I am going to show a program that combines both of the SQL statements, and makes a program that can be run time and again.

I am not going to repeat a lot of what I said in those posts, therefore, I recommend you read them before you start with this one.

I will show this program in three parts, as I think that will make it easier to explain and for you to understand. This is the first part:

Remove the deleted records from the file

This is the second part of the trilogy I started last week:

1. Change the file's size and reuse deleted records
2. Remove the deleted records from the file
3. Create a program to perform both of the above

In this post I will be giving an example of how I chose to remove the deleted records from all of the files in a library.

When a record is deleted from a file its space is not available to be reused, unless the file is reusing deleted records. Over time this can result in files have a few active records and many deleted ones. This is a waste of the available storage.

The Reorganize Physical File Member command, RGZPFM, is the command that will remove the delete records from a physical file. You need to be careful when using this command. If any of the files in the library are record address files the reorganization could make it impossible to retrieve the expected records from the file, do not reorganize them.

Change the files' size and reuse deleted records

Recently I have been surprised there have been several messages during the day-end process alerting that various files are full. The on-call system administrator has been answering the messages without issue, and the job continues. This is a sign there is some "clean up" that needs to be performed upon the files this error happened to:

• File size
• Remove deleted records from the file

I could use the system reply list, which will automatically answer a message for me. But this will make the response to the error happen to every time, and in this case to all files, that the errors happens to. Which is not what I want.

Making the changes I am going to suggest something that can be and easily performed on a single file basis. I want to be proactive and stop the error from happening for all the files in a library.

Rather than pack all of what I did into one post I am going make this a trilogy: