A dictionary file can be shared by multiple data files.
Referring to these files requires specifying the dictionary name as part of the filename. For example, a data file is called sales, which refers to all of the sales orders; however, a different method is to use two files, where the sales file (or the sales,sales file) refers to all sales orders for the current year, and the sales,history file refers to the orders from all the previous years. A major advantage is a reduction in data retrieval time for all of the more common functions dealing with current year-to-date data, since all of the history data is in a separate file. Since both files share the same structure, both files can share the same dictionary.
See Also