At 02:42 PM 1/19/2007, Steve Martin wrote:
Been trying to identify causes for scratch ($$$) files being left over (orphaned) during normal operation of the database.
Steve, First, welcome to the R:BASE World! It all has to do with the SORTing and SCRATCH settings. SORTing: FYI, if there is not enough memory space to do a sort, R:BASE creates temporary sort files (.$$$). The SET SORT ON parameter optimizes disk space usage. This is helpful if you get the message "Unable to create sort file. Check for full disk." Versions of R:BASE prior to 4.0A do not have the option to increase the amount of memory used for sorting, it is limited to 64K. With 4.0A and higher, you have the new options SET SORT MAX, and SET SORT MIN. R:BASE runs in extended memory and as such has a large pool of memory available for sorting (as opposed to conventional memory, with only 640 K total memory, sort space was limited to 64K). By default, with 4.0A and higher, sorting uses all available extended memory. You can use the SET SORT MAX and the SET SORT MIN parameters to allocate memory for sorting; setting maximum and minimum limits, respectively. Regarding SCRATCH settings: The latest versions of R:BASE 7.1, 7.5, 7.6, Turbo V-8, Oterro 3.1, 3.5 and 8.0 include the enhancement to simply type "TMP" for SCRATCH option in RBEngine.CFG, RBEngine75.CFG, RBEngine76.CFG, RBEngine8.CFG, OTERRO.CFG, OTERRO35 and OTERRO8.CFG files. Using the latest builds of R:BASE/OTERRO, you need to either update the line for "SCRATCH TMP" to automatically define the windows temporary environment or use "SCRATCH C:\TEMP", for example, in R:BASE/OTERRO configuration files. If you define the "SCRATCH C:\TEMP", make sure that you actually have the C:\TEMP directory. We suggest that you keep all configuration (*.CFG) file in Windows or WinNT directory. Updating the SCRATCH setting to TMP in the appropriate configuration files, R:BASE/OTERRO will use the user's TMP environment settings for SCRATCH files on startup. Use any text editor or R:BASE Editor 7.5 to edit the configuration file to read SCRATCH settings as follows: SCRATCH TMP This will help eliminate all issues related to setting the SCRATCH directory and related files. Hope that helps! Good luck upgrading the "legacy" database to R:BASE 7.5 for Windows. Should you have further questions, feel free to ask. Very Best R:egards, Razzak.
