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FairCom RTG COBOL Edition User's Guide

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File Maintenance Concerns with RTG

FairCom RTG brings a new level of control to your COBOL data tables with an enterprise-class database engine. With RTG you now have a central point of control that must be coordinate through when working with your tables. You must now think about "who owns the file?"

  • FairCom RTG Server now "owns" your COBOL files once converted to RTG. You must now consider that active data could be contained in our memory caches and not reflected on disk at any time. Unless you absolutely make a guarantee this is not the case, it is never safe to assume you can "copy" files directly via OS commands.
  • FairCom RTG Server can also open files for maintenance even after you closed them. Large deletes, index maintenance, etc, can trigger background processing when you least expect it. Copying files during these activities will result in corrupted copies.
  • We recommend that our server, and all files that it owns, operate at a higher secured OS privilege level than average users on the system. (This is the same advice any other database vendor would recommend.) This is for your security and protection. To manipulate files at the filesystem level should then become much more restrictive.

Based on these concerns you must choose what makes the most sense when working with files in question. Are they under direct RTG Server control? If so, then you must choose very carefully about what copy options you consider or you will risk data integrity issues. If you know a table is never actively processed via RTG and the server, then it is likely safe to copy via OS commands.

Frequently, we find that the local database administration team takes ownership of FairCom RTG as it becomes clear that their skills are uniquely matched for this type of environment.

Our advice: be extremely cautious with \files under RTG Server control. It is better to err on the safe side and coordinate all copies, backups etc., directly with the database engine.

Here's a list of all recommended options for direct RTG table filesystem interaction. Each of these methods tightly coordinates all activities with the server preserving full data integrity.

File Block

Database Quiesce

Hot Backups

ctutil -copy (-copy, ctutil -copy)

ctutil -filecopy

ctutil -clone

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