Prevent the most common cause of record lock errors so that you can sleep through the night.

By Kevin Forsythe

As long as we've written programs that update data files, there has been record lock, and as long as we continue to update data files, there will be record lock. But that doesn't mean that you have to get that 3:00 a.m. wake-up call when your nightly backups or day-end process failed because a user left a maintenance screen up that left a record locked, which is now causing you to get up in the middle of the night and figure out what happened and how to fix it.

What do you do when 15 characters just aren't enough?

By Mike Faust

If you're like me, you've become so used to abbreviating names for fields, data structures, prototypes, and subprocedures to stay within the 15-character limit that it's become part of your programming psyche. But what if there was a way to remove the limit of the length for these objects? As you may have already guessed, that's what this article is all about.