Can filepro do drill downs like acess?

[Bill Vermillion]

On Fri, Mar 26, 2004 at 10:26:15AM -0600, Mike Schwartz-PC Support & Services thus spoke:

> > You 'snapshot' the state of the system and then perform
> > a backup while the system is operational, but disk writes are
> > updated outside of the snapshot and when the backup is finished,
> > the system is brought to it's normal state with items that may have
> > been frozen in time by the snapshot brought up to date.

> > Am I off base in my understanding of transaction and rollbacks.

>  That's my understanding as well. Normally we would shut down
> the mainframe databases every evening in order to back them up
> and run the "snapshot". Then all the pending transactions get
> posted to the databases and the transaction numbers and posting
> flags got zeroed out. Then we did a final tape backup before
> opening up the databases again.

The snapshot concept means you don't have to keep databases
shutdown.  You need to get the system quiescent - and that could be
a momentary shutdown, but a snapshot can take just a few sconds,
and then you backup the snapshot while the system continiues doing
the jobs for which it was intended.

>  On a couple of the mainframes, the databases were closed
> during lunch also, so that the pending transactions could be
> posted.

Thank fully posting is much faster now. :-)

>  I held titles like programmer/analyst and computer operator
> during this era, so I don't know the internal workings very
> well. When transactions had to be rolled back or there were
> other problems, the database administrator and systems
> programmers would be called in to straighten them out.

>  By the way, usually the rollbacks did *not* work, even in
> testing. It was cause for great celebration when one *did*
> work!

Sounde like a desing or implementation flaw to me.

Bill


-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com