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

:) 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.