[Info-vax] Indexed file read question

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2020-11-19 17:36:47 +0000, Hein RMS van den Heuvel said:

> Mind you for VMSmail, this caused no issue because the PK was a 
> timestamp and thus convert delivered messages in folders by time order.

Message arrival order is not the same as timestamp order, with MAIL.  A 
disparity lurks within the MAIL handling of folders, though that was 
ignored as it's only very rarely encountered and benign.

> Many, if not most, business application essentially hand out PK's in 
> always increasing order again making the right thing happen in general, 
> but not guaranteed. I'm sure this has caused head-scratching or perhaps 
> support calls over time.
> 
> Fun?

Fun that can arise in these cases:
...German Tank Problem.
...Daylight Saving Time. Which is the source of the above 
timestamp-versus-arrival-sequence bug.
...Filenaming order and directory sorting, as per an existing MAIL mess.


RMS doc needs an overhaul and updates, and cookbooks. It's scattered 
all over, at present.

OpenVMS needs better built-in storage options, such as SQLite, 
discussions of The One True Database (Rdb) aside.



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