Remember a GFE in the original versions of PICK? A GFE was a structural database problem, where GFE means – Group Format Error – or more jokingly – Gone For Ever. UniVerse has BLINK and FLINK errors – Backward Link and Forward Link errors respectively.
Well, at a clients site recently, I found under a desk a box of U2 bits. I assume that someone has been collecting all the BLINK and FLINKs as they occur and not knowing what to do with them, placed them in a box:
<image lost>
Maybe they are not Gone For Ever, but just need to be saved by a dummy… 😀
The reference to ‘saved by a dummy’ is no reflection apon myself or my clients, but a reference to the fact in older PICK systems the only way to find GFE’s was to do a dummy FILE-SAVE.
The file save process was used to force a read of every record in every file in the system, logging errors…