What application programmers need to know about variable-length segments

If you are using variable-length segments in your database, you need to let application programmers who will be using the database know this.

They need to know which of the segment types they have access to are variable in length and the maximum size of each of these variable-length segment types. In calculating the size of their I/O area, application programmers must use the maximum size of a variable-length segment. In addition, they need to know that the first two bytes of the data portion of a variable-length segment contain the length of the data portion including the size field.

Working with the application programmer, you should devise a scheme for accessing data in variable-length segments.