Re: DB2 vs MySQL ... Oh I have learned a lot!

[Vernon Hamberg <vhamberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

:)  The pages of the manual that stick out of my ears and nose = well!!

I really don't have them all memorized, and, like you, I do a lot of 
googling.

The UTF8 bit interests me - there is a CCSID parameter on one of the 
CAST function or the CHAR function, and data can be set to Unicode in 
the database.- would any of that help in this area?

OTOH, IBM i does some automatic conversion when your QCCSID is set to 
something other than 65535 (no conversion). The system knows, at many 
levels of its operation, what the CCSID is of a column in a table and, 
when it knows the CCSID of your job, it does an auto-convert using 
iconv, I think. Very cool stuff!!

Our system is still set to 65535, and when I do a SELECT of some of the 
system catalog tables that have Unicode, it gets pretty strange what I 
see. I can get around it by doing a CHGJOB CCSID(37) before going into 
STRSQL, though.

BTW, I'll do my best to hold off on RTFM - credit it to old leaky brain 
and hasty replies, perhaps!!

Regards
Vern

On 1/13/2016 10:48 AM, Rob wrote:
> I am finding that I was quite spoiled with MySQL.
>
> But as I always suspected, DB2 on i is the power house RDMS of the 
> entire industry.  Total FAN!
>
> I am pleased with their implementation of Limit from MySQL.  Would 
> have been great if it had been implemented the same, and not so 
> verbose...
>
> as in this snippet from one of my scripts: "FETCH FIRST 80 ROWS ONLY"  
> And what I read...  this does not guarantee the same row with each 
> call unless an "ORDER BY" is included.
>
> I also understand that IBM has to be sure not to BREAK DB2 for others.
>
> I understand IBM not wanting to change the character set from EBCDIC 
> to UTF8.  And I would never ask that of them, but at the same time, 
> for someone that wants to use UTF8, to be in lock step with the rest 
> of the world, at least give the option.
>
> Although with the data sets that I am working with... I have not 
> noticed a problem yet, and I have not had to do any data conversions.
>
> In my thinking, once I get a SQL result from DB2 in my PHP script, I 
> am simply comparing Strings To Strings at this point.  Not sure if 
> PASE or some other mechanism does any conversion or not.
>
> I appreciate each and everyone's information.
>
> And cheers to you Vern...  as I do RTFM....  but when the manual does 
> not answer a question, or makes it very difficult to solve a riddle..  
> and after several google attempts to find anything of relevance, I 
> post in these forums....  I unlike you do not have the manuals in my 
> head...  and as most would understand, my projects are many, 
> underfunded, and have meaningful time allotted.  And I do not consider 
> spending my down time reading through those horrible manuals.
>
> I get so much more understand from examples when it comes to syntax.