As part of testing the next release of the RAP we came across a very nice feature which will help us manage our Source Code across systems. We have always seen the journalling of PF-SRC files as a problem especially with any Replication solution such as MiMiX,iTera or Orion etc. The problem is with the way the journalling of the files is managed, the file is essentially cleared and recreated everytime the editor is finished with the file. If the file is not journalled this can be accomplished in one of 3 ways – row by row, block copy or cloning. However as soon as you journal the file you are automatically forced into a row by row rebuild. (Thanks to Larry Youngren for providing the information on this for me). This adds lots of overhead on the source system which is compounded on the source because while the editor on the source has an idea of what it needs to do and can pre-empt memory allocation etc, the journal replication products have no such information so they just have to plod through the records one at a time! We had been working with a customer on a problem which also seems to cause all file members to be replicated due to hidden entries in the journal, but we need to get IBM involved to sort that one out!
This is the main reason the HA products are never used to replicate source files in this manner. They will adopt a member by member replication or simply do a file level copy, the methods of capturing this are not pretty either even where they do actually provide the capability.
We have come up with an alternative solution which allows the actual changes to be copied to the target system at the row level. one simple command can bring the entire source file up to date very effectively and simply. We will add more functionality to the solution so you can schedule a request through your normal job scheduler that will take a library name and it will go out and sync up the file rows which are different.
If you need a method of keeping your source files in sync across systems give us a call and we can discuss how it can be achieved.