SORT-MERGE/XL Programmer's Guide (32650-90884)

16 Chapter1
Introduction
Error Checking
For more information about specifying keys, refer to Chapter 2. For more information
about collating sequences, refer to Chapter 4.
Error Checking
Good programming practice specifies that each intrinsic call should be checked to ensure
that the call was successful. Each intrinsic contains a
status parameter that returns a
value indicating the success or failure of the routine.
If no error occurred with the intrinsic call, a value of zero (0) is returned in the
status
parameter.
If an error did occur with the intrinsic call, the first 16 bits, bits (0:16), of
status contain
the error condition code. The first 16 bits are always negative; all SORT-MERGE/XL errors
are fatal. HPSORT and HPMERGE status returns are in Appendixes A and B.
The last 16 bits, bits (16:16), of
status contain the subsystem identification number. The
subsystem number for SORT/XL is 195. The subsystem number for MERGE/XL is 196.
(Refer to the MPE/iX Intrinsics Reference Manual for information about calculating the
error number and subsystem from the
status parameter.)
The HPMERGEERRORMESS and HPSORTERRORMESS intrinsics return the appropriate error
message for each of these error code values. (For information about the use of the error
message intrinsics, refer to Chapter 2.)
Large File Support
The SORT/XL subsystem has been modified to support Large File functionality available
in release 6.5. SORT/XL can handle multiple input files and the sum of the input file sizes
cannot be larger than about 107GB. SORT/XL normally allocates two scratch files each of
which is about one hundred twenty percent larger than the sumn of the input files and
those files must be smaller than the maximum object size of 128GB.
The maximum native mode data type record length handled by SORT/XL has been raised
to about 32,000 bytes from the current limit of 4096 bytes. The actual maximum record
length depends on the number and length of the keys.