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                    *                                   *
                    *          DB/C Newsletter          *
                    *           January 1999            *
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                              News and Comments

     We missed our January targets for releasing DB/C JX 2.0 and for starting
beta testing of DB/C DX 10.0 and DB/C FS 2.1.  Hopefully, we'll have better
progress to report in the February newsletter.  We are looking for DB/C DX
beta testers, so if you are interested, please contact us.

     This month we continue with more Frequently Asked Questions.  If you
have any useful tidbits to contribute, please forward them to us.
 
                                                        don.wills@swc.com

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                       DB/C Frequently Asked Questions

Question:

     We occasionally get I 602 errors running DB/C 9.1 for Win32 on our
Windows NT workstations.  The occurrences are seemingly random.  What is
the cause?

Answer:

     When any Microsoft Office application is installed, a program called
FINDFAST.EXE is installed and is put into the StartUp directory.  This
program opens all files on local disks that end with certain extensions,
including the .TXT extension.  The purpose of this is make Office applications
open documents, etc. faster.  Unfortunately, this causes an I 602 when a
DB/C program attempts to open a file that FINDFAST already has open.  The
solution is to remove FINDFAST.EXE from the StartUp directory.

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Question:

     We use a network version of DB/C (DOS or Win32, version 8 or 9).  The
performance of DB/C is fine on our 10Mb Ethernet, but over a 64Kb leased
line being used as an extension to our LAN, performance is acceptable for
one user, but degrades quickly with additional users.  What can we do?
 
Answer:

     Generally, the Win32 or DOS version of DB/C, when running in a Wide Area
Network (WAN) is somewhat slow.  The reason for this is that when an indexed
read or write occurs, all index blocks that are affected move between the
client machine (running DB/C) and the file server.  This problem can be
alleviated somewhat by adding bandwidth - generally 32K to 64K per user just
for minimally adequate performance.

     In the near future, you will be able to use DB/C DX with DB/C FS to
accomplish the same thing.  In this environment, only the records traverse
the network, not the index blocks.  For typical applications this means a
large reduction in network traffic and an improvement in performance.

     Another approach is to use remote terminal services.  This is good if
you use a character based interface (like telnet), but can also be slow when
you use something like Citrix or MS Terminal Server.

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Questions:

     In UNIX, if I define DBC_MEMALLOC=6000 and then start the DB/C runtime,
does it allocate all of the 6MB immediately?  Is this memory allocated by
the DB/C runtime swappable?  If there exists a DBC_MEMALLOC environment
variable and also a DBC_MEMALLOC statement in the file referred to by DBC_ENV,
which takes precedence?

Answer:

     Yes, the DBC_MEMALLOC space is allocated immediately.  The memory is
swappable.  And the environment variable takes precedence over the entry in
the DBC_ENV file.

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Question:

     We use the EDIT utility to edit some large data files.  Unfortunately,
it only seems to be able to load about 10,000 70 character records.  Is there
anything we can do?

Answer:

     Use the -A option on the EDIT command line to enlarge the in-memory
work area of EDIT.  The size of files that may edited with EDIT is limited
by size of the in-memory work area buffer.  Note that in both Win32 and UNIX,
the value of -A is limited only by system swap space, not by physical memory.
Thus it is possible to edit very large files with EDIT.



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                            DB/C Class Schedule

   Class:     DB/C DX and JX Language Fundamentals
   Date:      February 8-10, 1999
   Location:  Oak Brook, Illinois

   For information, contact Judi Tamkevic at:
       voice  630.572.0240
       email  dbc@swc.com


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