More than 80 members of the Special Interest Group for IMAGE cast ballots to tell HP the top enhancement they want is the ability to set maximum chain lengths for the database.

The SIG’s notes from its semi-annual meeting in California describe the enhancement as an HP project that “would probably involve adding a unique key command to DBSCHEMA, adding a unique key flag to the root file, and adding a new unique key error status code to DBPUT and DBUPDATE. Then DBPUT and DBUPDATE (with the CIUPDATE option) would have to be modified to check the length of the chain on the primary key path before adding or updating; if the length is already > 0 then set the new error status and quit. The addition of a unique key option for detail datasets would bring IMAGE closer to Codd’s minimal definition of a relational database.”

Close behind in the polling, which took place online over two weeks in March and April, was adding a global file FOPEN, a system-wide handle for a file that would “improve performance and avoid single-process maximum number of open files limit. Several sites are already hitting this limit. IMAGE and other Privileged Mode processes could then access the file via file system intrinsics.”

Items that finished three through five on the IMAGE ballot were making IMAGE thread-aware and thread-safe; allowing tracking files such as schemas and third-party indexes to be associated with an IMAGE database; and creating a concurrent IMAGE read-only DBLOCK mode, known as a repeatable read.

The SIG placed 40 items in its latest ballot — but decided to drop items from the ballot regarding adding and dropping datasets, indexes and items on the fly; augmenting DBSCHEMA with a graphical interface that does SQL management; and supporting data replication with foreign databases such as Oracle. SIG members identified these projects as “very large tasks, with other things HP needs to do first.”

Items which finished in slots six through 40 can be found on the Web at www.trenzsoft.com/sig_results/ sigimage_2000_results.html#rank. HP has not committed to doing any of the enhancements on the list.