In my experience, there are lists of questions used by the initial screeners, often phone screening. The people doing this interview are given an answer and told to pass on those who answer X of 10. So the screener is looking for a specific answer and we are boring them and failing to answer their question. Or worse yet, arguing with them.

Phil

Trust me, I’m over 30 and I’ve seen many vague interview questions. I’ve been into programming since the IBM 1620 and went into Consulting in 1985. The questions are vague on purpose. They are trying to understand your expertise AND your ability to communicate. Especially, if the interviewee is a non-technical person.

Enjoy,
MIS

Interview questions are notoriously bad .. this could have been a ten year old question,or the answer they expected was what one of their programers worked out experiemently or they could have left out critical information.

How to handle this poor question?

“I’m sure you have some very specific solution in mind but I don’t have an answer,
It feels like your question lacks some critical information that would help frame the solution.

Given the flexibility of DB2 and the continued preformance improvements of this system, I’m surprised that there is one fastest method that applies to all cases.

Even though I don’t know the answser I’m sure that I could develop a solution to your problem. I’ve had to solve many proformance issues, in solving them I’ve:
- researched the specific case
- conducted tests to confirm that I had reliable solution.
I suspect that your solution took equal amounts of research and testing.”

The other tact might be to turn the question around
– not how to read all the records but Why read all the records? What are the business reasons for doing this? Could a summary SQL solve the problem faster?
Could a logical file or open query file reduce the number of accesses necessary?
As a developer, analyst, designer, isn’t it more important that the business reasons for doing a process be explored before getting committed to a specific method?

Good luck.
Phil

Tom

actually this was the question i was asked in an interview, and i thought chaining a record with no lock would make the file read faster…

essentially the question was to read a file start to end, every record in the file such a way that the processing is done faster..

You’ve asked us a question.
We’ve been polite enough to respond, give you some ideas and ask for further infomation.
You owe us a response.

Phil

Usually, there are two reasons for wanting to read the records in fastest possible manner. Either the file is small but needs to be read many times, e.g., some kind of lookup table, or it is a very large file that may take a long time to process.

(Assuming some recent release of the OS, at least V5R3…) Although SQL will generally outperform RPG native I/O in any sequential processing, larger files tend to put SQL even farther ahead.

However, the type of processing that might be done for records that are read can make significant differences.

Describe the files for us, and give some indication of what will happen to each record. How old are the files? How are they indexed? Are they DDS files or SQL tables? Will all records be processed the same? Do some records need to be linked to records in other files, while different records will be linked to different files? Are the multiple different calculations for different records? Will there be CALLs into other programs? You haven’t even told us what languages you might use.

Often, the overall fastest “reading” of a file is done by FTP, so “Use FTP” should be the answer to your question. But it’s not likely that helps you much. Unfortunately, you haven’t given us much to go on. Until you tell us something about the files and the processes, there is no good answer.

Tom