neeraja

• Oct 9th, 2007

 

In fixed length record, the record length is sum of all the record (length).
In variable length record, the record size is maximum record length + 4bytes.

kckinney

 Profile Answers by kckinney Questions by kckinney

• Sep 3rd, 2010

 

 FB datasets all have the same record length.  Programs that look for data in certain columns are likely to use FB datasets. 
On the down side, there may be unused bytes on the end of each record, wasting space.

The alternative is VB records.  These can be more efficient when processing records of unknown length.  For example, free form character input.
Each record is prefixed by a 4 byte RDW which tells the system how long the next record is.
The down side is that VB's have more overhead as the system has to look up each record length and format memory accordingly.

When coding programs, you will most often use FB datasets.