Impact of workareas on size of store

At the recent Seattle Users Group meeting an IW person --name withheld to protect the innocent... and I forgot it Smiley Wink

mentioned that much of the backend store is now (5.5.x) virtualized using pointers (or some such). Does this mean that adding work areas does not have a significant impact on the size of the store?

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Comments

nipper

Adding workareas never (significantly) increased the size of the store. A WA has always been basically a collection of pointers, using i-nodes (on Unix) but not increasing the amount of disk.

Andy

adam1

That was the answer I was looking for. I was worried that I would have hundreds and thousands of copies of files all over the place. When I asked "my" guy who would know, he gave me that impression.

I assume that you meant "in Unix i-nodes are used", and not "in unix workareas don't significantly increase the size of a store because we use i-nodes," meaning that in windows we actually get copies of files.

That would kill me since we just switched to a windows machine for 5.5 (not by choice but availability).

Adam

nipper

True. More i-nodes are used in unix. In DOS (all Windows is still DOS to me), I do not know what you resource it is called, but same thing. The only copies that are made are when files
are change.

Andy