A picture string indicating how a value stored using the DATE datatype will appear in output from the client application, as well as the format in which date values will be presented to the Data Vault Loader. Additionally, date constants may be referenced in SQL statements according to the user-defined date picture, as well as using the standard date formats.

default.

yyyy-mm-dd

(for July 1, 2003, Data Vault Service will display 2003-07-01).

Entries can be various combinations of the letters

y

for year,

m

for Month,

d

for Day, and

w

for Weekday (lowercase only), along with any other characters used as separators. Some common separators are colons (

:

), hyphens (

-

), and slashes (

/

). The Day, Month, Year and Weekday components can be ordered in any way, for example:

dd/mm/yy

,

mm/dd/yy

,

yy/mm/dd

.

If the date picture specifies only the last two digits of the year (

yy

), the Data Vault Service must assume a default century for date constants that use this format. This determination is based on the last two digits of the year:

The full year is produced by adding the last two year digits to the base year. For example, if

yy

=

03

, the base year is

2000

, and the full year is 03 + 2000 =

2003

.

If the user-defined date picture is invalid, date values will be displayed using the default format.

A picture string indicating how a value stored using the TIME datatype will appear in output from the client application, as well as the format in which time values will be presented to the Data Vault Loader.

default.

hh:mm:ss

(for ten minutes past 2 pm, Data Vault Service will display 14:10:00)

Entries can be various combinations of the letters

h

for Hours,

m

for Minutes, and

s

for Seconds (lowercase only); any other characters can be used as separators. Commonly used separators are colon (:), hyphen (-), and period (.). The Hour, Minute, and Second components can be ordered in any way, for example:

hh:mm:ss

,

ss:mm:hh

,

hh:ss:mm

.

For a 24-hour clock, place the number 24 at the end of the picture.

For a 12-hour clock, place the number 12 at the end of the picture.

If you do not specify the clock type, a 24-hour clock is assumed. For 12-hour clocks, you can include the characters “am” in your picture in the location you want “am” or “PM” to appear. Use the case you want used in the display.

According to the 24-hour clock format, noon is represented as 12:00:00 and midnight is 00:00:00.

If the user-defined time picture is invalid, time values will be displayed using the default format.

Sets the drives where the temporary loader files will be written. Multiple drives can be listed, separated by semicolons (

;

). The number of temporary files created by the loader is related to the

ssadl -j

flag value: if the

-j

value is

n

, then there will be at least

n

temporary files.

Default. . (current directory)

For best results, ensure that the temporary drive is

not

located on the same disk as the database or, especially, the flat file. In addition, make sure that the amount of free disk space in the temporary drive is at least three (

3

) times the size of the flat file.

Allocates buffer space in memory (in megabytes) to hold Virtual File System (VFS) data during Parallel Loader operations. By default, VFS data is not cached. Enabling this parameter (by setting it to a positive value) can speed up load operations and compressed data file creation.

Sets the Virtual File System (VFS) page size (in kilobytes). Data is written to the VFS in clusters of this size. If multiple locations for the VFS are specified by the TempDrive parameter, one page of data at a time will be written to each location in "round robin" fashion.