I thought you could add multiple supplemental indexes with you butil or the
GUI utility... Does this work or is there any utility that allows adding
multiple supplemental indexes at one time!

You should be able to although there are certain "limits".

I believe you can, but am not sure you would want to add more than one
at a time. Sequentially should be fine, but more than one at a time
would probably actually be slower.

The Btrieve API call itself only allows the addition of one key at a
time. For details see:
http://www.pervasive.com/library/doc...PI8.html#34182
from the http://www.pervasive.com/library/

I am sure that like any other Btrieve API call you could make more
than one at a time (multi-threaded using the "id" family of calls or
separate processes), however adding a key to the data file requires
quite a few heavy steps be performed for all but the most trivial of
data sets, e.g. 1) extract the key segments from existing records, 2)
sort the key segments (done in memory if there is enough free memory
or is disk based sort if RAM is not available), 3) write all the new
index pages into the data file. Step 1 requires reading every record
in the file, step 2 sorts them and step 3 writes the new index
information. Step 2 would quickly run out of memory if you made more
than 1 call at a time forcing a disk based sort (slower) on all but
the most trivial of data files.

To try it out you should be able to launch multiple copies of butil or
the maintenance utility and kick them all off at the same time.
I believe that if the 2 or more sequential reads going at the same
time will cause file IO thrashing where the disk head is seeking back
and forth between the two sequential reads unless it all fits in RAM.

Leonard

On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 16:31:47 GMT, "Wendell Buckner"
<wendellbuckner (AT) sbcglobal (DOT) net> wrote:

Thanks for your response!

I'm more frustrated with the fact that the utilities BUTIL & MAINTENANCE
can't read the key definitions (from a definition file) and apply them one
after the other (doing multiple api calls)... this way I could put all the
supplemental keys into one key definition file instead creating multiple
definition files and having to run butil or the maintenance app N number of
times to add N supplemental keys...

You tool(s) look intereseting
"Leonard" <lharvey (AT) austin (DOT) rr.com> wrote

"Wendell Buckner" <wendellbuckner (AT) sbcglobal (DOT) net> wrote

Depending on the size of your tables, the fastest method would
probably be to do a save. Sort that output file with Opt-Tech Sort or
another hi-performance utility that can take advantage of your 2 GB of
RAM. After the sort, do a load (WITHOUT the indices) and then add your
indices. Voila!

Or if you have a couple of extra days, you could always use Microsoft -SQL.
[:-}

BUTIL *CAN* be used to add multiple keys simultaneously -- this is very handy
for when adding keys takes a long time, and you don't want to wait around.
BUTIL @commandFile
This form of the BUTIL command will execute multiple commands (i.e. create index
calls, even) in sequence. See the manuals for full details...
BB


Wendell Buckner wrote:

thanks... don't know how I missed this in the docs!

"Bill Bach" <bbach (AT) cncdsl (DOT) com> wrote