A common approach to this is to include the Expire Inventory statement in
your server options file, with an interval of 0.  Then the expire inventory
command is executed via an administrative schedule.  (This assumes you are
running a Version 2 server.)

Another approach is to set the interval at 24, which means it will occur
when you start the server, and then ever 24 hours after that.  The action
occurs at the same time every day, based on your start time.  With the
administrative schedule mentioned above, you of course set the time that it
will execute, regardless of what time the server started.

What will this do to your DB?  If you are taking the default 1 hour, then
nothing.  However, doing the expire inventory every hour has no benefit -
it just takes up a lot of CPU cycles.  The effect of running it once a day
is about the same, but with a lot less overhead.

The expire inventory process does exactly what it means - it goes through
the DB, and processes all of the management classes against the inventory,
and deletes entries as appropriate.  If you never run it, entries would
just stay there, growing obviously.

Hope this clears things up.

Jerry Lawson
jlawson AT thehartford DOT com



______________________________ Forward Header __________________________________
Subject: Expire Inventory
Author:  INTERNET.OWNERAD at SNADGATE
Date:    2/25/97 6:02 PM


EXPIRE INVENTORY command!

What does it do, and how often do I have to execute this command.?

Will it reduce the size of my database?

How long does it take to run on  AIX 4.1?

Thanks again