Hi All,

i am little bit confusion about HOLD and SAVE
i knew that SAVE doesn't create master file.

here i am looking for the Overview of all of them and Differences between them.

Just give me your approaches When we should use HOLD and save and savb.

Thanks,

Kaylan,

At least you are reading the information for yourself!! Perhaps you can encourage your colleagues along the same path? Perhaps even impart your acquired knowledge by giving them some training??

As to best usage, it comes down to application (obviously) and generally I would suggest that HOLD would be used when you want to further process the data, SAVE when you do not require a master but want the data available to another application (CSV files, dialogue manager -READs etc.) and SAVB when you want the data in the internal format (numerics held as binary etc.) without the master file description - possibly because you have the master file already.

SAVB is probably not used that much now-a-days as the tendency appears to be to create and load a FOCUS file if you have the master file desc. I certainly haven't used it for quite a while.

Hope this helps.

T

I have never, and that's a long time, used SAVB. Never found a need to.

Generally, it is what you are going to do with the result. Simply, if you are going to use DM to access the file with a -READ, use SAVE. If you are going to access the file with TABLE or MODIFY, I would use HOLD.

The default file format for HOLD is Binary. If I was to collect data from multiple sources and the same format I will HOLD the first source. I will then use FILEDEF with APPEND on the HOLD file and use ON TABLE SAVB AS HOLD. Another option is to just use ON TABLE SAVB and use an OpSys command to concatenate the files. For example -UNIX cat savb.ftm >> hold.ftm.

Thanks to all for your Scraps!!