R E M T A B


                      REMOTE TABLE HANDLING ROUTINES

                                Version 2.0

                              September, 1988

                             INTRODUCTION



WHAT IS REMTAB?

REMTAB is a collection of routines written in VAX COBOL and MACRO that
were  designed to ease the task of dealing with static and semi-static
data definitions that are used by multiple programs.   These  routines
were  developed  by  TERADYNE,  Inc.   in  conjunction with a VAX DBMS
application  which  is  now  used  by  Teradyne's   Customer   Service
Organization.

Early on in the development cycle of the  system  we  determined  that
there  would  be  certain types of data that we would need to maintain
that would not require any or would require very  little  in  the  way
modifications.   We  quickly  learned that a DBMS database was not the
kind of place to be storing these small data  sets.   We  experimented
with  the idea of having separate RMS files for each table and decided
that this too was not going to suffice.  In both  cases  the  overhead
involved in loading the tables was too costly.  In certain programs up
to ten different tables would need to be loaded and in the case of the
RMS  file  idea  the amount of time invloved in simply opening each of
the separate table files was sufficient enough that we decided to look
at other alternatives.

The Remote Table concept soon started to evolve.  Our  first  attempts
were much better than the RMS file concept but it was still taking too
long to load all of the tables  required  by  certain  programs.   The
subroutine  that  loaded  the  tables  was  written  in  COBOL  and we
determined that this was likely part of the problem.  After  scrapping
the  table  loader  module and rewritting it in VAX MACRO we noticed a
considerable improvement over  the  prior  version.   Finally  we  has
something we could use.