Posted by Jim Guerber on November 23, 2010 at 07:22:49:
Comet legacy keyed files get into a problem when they reach a size of 4.2 GB. That is the point where a double word (4 byte) pointer cycles from 0xffffffff to 0. These pointers are attached to every key in the I00 file. Older Comet releases did not detect this situation and just "wrapped" the file back to zero and continued on. More recent Comet systems (2008? 2009?) detect this situation and produce an error.
The very simple solution to this is to copy the file to an EXTENDED key file. An Extended keyed file is not necessarily a multi-keyed file. It must have the key in the record, however. To convert a keyed file to an extended keyed file, you do NOT have to modify your programs in any way. Just copy the file, that is all.
Now, let's say the legacy keyed file's records did not contain the key. Bad form, I know, but Comet takes care of that for you as well. Just specify that the key is beyond the current record of the file when creating the extended keyed file. All of your current programs perform writes containing the key= clause, right? Well, Comet will automatically copy that key to your record before writing it, even though you never specified that field in your format statement.
Of course, the best way to treat extended keyed files is to include the key in your record format and eliminate all of those (now extraneous) key= clauses. But you really don't have to do that.
The file size limit of an extended keyed file is 0xffffffffffffffff bytes, or 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 bytes. I don't know the nomenclature for that, but I think it is beyond Tera.
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