Many times this approach results from the fact that purges require 'manual' intervention by the DBA staff during off-hours. The approach described in the following paragraphs was developed to relieve our DBA staff of much of the burden of maintaining the roughly 20 Gb of data distributed among 60 Production databases on 10 Unix servers by automating the process to the point where our Computer Operators can assume much of the responsibility for its execution. The dump utility can be run as any number of concurrent sessions, each dumping different files, but only one reload process is necessary, The core programs are designed to be run against any database on any system without modification. The only programs in this process that must be written specifically for each system are those which deal with specific record selection criteria. If another copy is already running, control passes to Step 7. 2.
Connection is made to the target database.
The link indicator field is set to 'yes' for all files which do not get dumped at all or are dumped in conjunction with other files. For each file, it determines whether or not a specific purge program exists. The name of the output file is equivalent to the name of the bulkload 'fd' file which is needed to load the data into the new database. The file contains 1 record, listing the output record counts for the program and the date and time of program completion. The load process is controlled by the execution of the Unix shellscript - bulkload.sh.