1. We create both Windows Zipped and z/OS Tersed distribution files for MXG Software, which is a single sequential pure text file, currently 2,119,181 lines of text; the lines are FB 80 on z/OS, but are not numbered, so the file is smaller as a variable-length ASCII file.
Our current version's stored sizes are: Size of FB 80 EBCDIC file, z/OS 169,534,800 bytes Size of PC ASCII variable length 104,353,987 bytes Zipped PC file 17,589,006 bytes Tersed FB 80 21,653,504 bytes Terse reduced the z/OS file by a factor of 7.82. Zip reduced the ASCII file by a factor of 5.93. But, the 8-bit z/OS file is 62% larger than the ASCII file; not only is there the 8-bit EBDCIC vs 7-bit ASCII, but the ASCII file lines are the actual length of text, while each line of the z/OS file is 80 bytes long. But the 169:21 reduction, almost 8:1 reduction of the 80-byte EBCDIC text to its TERSEd equivalent is very consistent with my experience with not only text files, but also z/OS customer's SMF data files. 2. For Windows-to-Windows ftp with compression, we use Serv-U as our ftp server and Voyager ftp clients, and consistently see the same 8:1 compression, i.e. reduced transfer time to 1/8th; sure would be nice if z/OS ftp programs would support Serv-U's compression for our customer's ftp of our product. But even without compression, with a single T1, it only takes 15 minutes to download the 160MB file, which is a whole lot faster than even overnight shipment. 3. Unfortunately, after writing paragraph 2, I realize you want to unterse on the PC, so that information is of no use to you, (but, having been written it's still worth sharing that experience with this august group). I'm not aware of any un-Terse on ASCII platforms, so I still have to ship customer's Tersed datas to a z/OS box for Un-tersing. Barry Merrill ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
