Re: Retrieving integer parameter after JT400 ProgramCall?

Joe Sam Shirah skrev:

Hi Thorbjørn,

You still need the ODBC driver. The JDBC driver is special because...

I'm not particularly interested in defending Microsoft technology, but
I'm not sure I get your point, other than I would agree that Java/JDBC is a
superior solution. You still need a JDBC driver as well. Do you commonly
make code changes to the JDBC driver, or is that really a code term for
"free"? There are other ODBC drivers available in addition to the one with
Client Access.

I think it is a code term for "freely and easily redistributable".
I have spent much time inside the toolbox but not much in the SQL driver, but the value of being able to say to a customer "You do not need Client Access installed to run this program" is high, and has made it possible to make programs that I literaly thought nobody used, but only apparently because nobody had problems with it. This is not a testament to my programming abilities but the quality of the Sun Java system and the IBM Java toolbox, combined with a good launcher so we could just give customers a single EXE file instead of a full installer based application.

As to building the table on the AS/400, then using the ODBC driver with
SQL Server to copy the table to SQL Server for performance reasons:

Is this the fault of the database driver, the network or the database
itself?

None of the above. Sorry for not communicating more clearly. The

I am not a native speaker so I might have misread you.

bugaboo was that the client had ended up with a system that had part of the
data on the AS/400 and the other part on SQL Server. The real solution was
to put everything in one database, but I didn't have that option, and had to
integrate with the existing system and schema. Doing distributed queries
with joins to multiple tables *in different databases* ( "different" here
meaning not just on another computer, but also on a completely different
DBMS ) was too expensive in terms of processing, regardless of which
database was the host.

A reasonable conclusion. A _lot_ of data might have to migrate over the wire.

Because downstream processing eventually depended on data resident on
SQL Server, I moved the table from the AS/400/DB2 to SQL Server. However,
the initial data all came from the AS/400. I could get it built from SQL
Server by using the AS/400 ODBC driver with a distributed call. However, it
turned out to be far faster to continue building the table on the AS/400 and
then let SQL Server use ODBC for a copy of the single table.

Thanks for the explanation. I thought it was DB2/400 that was slow and SQL Server that was faster, but it was essentially the two databases in tandem that was too slow.