Licensing

[Jean-Pierre A. Radley]

Mike Schwartz propounded (on Sat, Jun 28, 2014 at 09:48:00AM -0500):
| 
| >> Fp, in the days of smaller drives, allowed for adding key/data extents to
| the same or different drives.  Today with the larger drive capacity, the
| only time one would want to do this is when the file size is nearing the 2GB
| limit on a 32bit OS.
| >>
| >> I don't recall exactly what the naming convention is for these extents.
| 
| > Yea, please explain what extents is.
| > 
| > Thanks, Mike
| 
| 
|       At this point you will have a CUST file that has (roughly) a
| 1-Gigabyte "key" segment and a 1-Gigabyte "data" segment in it, but the file
| will contain all the data from your original CUST database and it willlook
| and operate exactly like your original CUST file did.
| 
| Hope this doesn't confuse you further...


Well, it confused me, a bit...

Mike, you took a database with a key file but a zero-length data file
and moved about half the key files's fields into the data file.  If you
reached an OS-imposed 2GB limit in the key file, sure, you would now
reach the 2GB limit on either the key file or the data file,

But that's not what I ever understood by extents.  FilePro can generate
(in addition to key and data) keyx1 &datax1, keyx2 & datax2, keyx3 &
datax3. Instead of hitting a 2GB limit on on a single file, you will be
limited to 2GB on any one of the eight files, filePro sees the database
with such extents as having a big virtual concatenated key file (and if
present, a concatenated data file).

You need to have additional filesystems to exploit this capability.


>From the manual:

Extending Key Files (keyx1, keyx2, keyx3) :

  Expand Files also lets you switch drives for new records being added
  to a key (and data) file. (You might want to do this when your data
  gets too large for the current filesystem.) If, at the "Number of
  Records to Expand File By" prompt, you type the word "switch". filePro
  will allow you to designate a new hard drive (filesystem). From this
  point on, all records in this file will be added to a file called
  "keyx1" (and datax1) in the same hierarchical path as the primary
  drive. If there already is a keyx1, filePro will add keyx2 and then
  keyx3. You are limited to 3 expansion filesystems for a total of
  four filesystems when considering the original "key" and "data"
  files. Extending "key" files is not recommended as normal procedure
  since it is better to move the entire key file to a larger drive. This
  feature is a holdover from earlier days when hard drives were very
  small. However, extended keys can be used for very large files when
  you have exceeded the maximum file size for the filesystem. Maximum
  file size is determined by the operating system/partitioning method.