RE: embedded SQL Precompiler

["Joe Pluta" <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From: M. Lazarus
>
>   As compared to what?  The rest of the SQL world?  PLENTY!  A couple of
> examples:  How would you retrieve the top 10 of a list?  SQL Server and
> Oracle (I believe) have TOP XX.  How about ROWNUM, which would allow me to
> retrieve, say, rows 50-100?  This is on V4.5, so my apologies to Rochester
> if these have been added in 5.1.

Don't shoot me for asking, but how often do you retrieve an arbitrary number
of rows starting somewhere in the middle of a view?  Isn't that what a
scrollable cursor is for?  And I thought there was the ability to get the
first NN rows, but I could be wrong.  I'm no SQL expert.

Of course, what I'd REALLY like, for SQL to be useful to me, would be the
ability to create a view, and then position in it using keys, then be able
to read forward through the cursor.  Of course, that's just my old
SETLL/READ, which you all know I'm sorta partial to.

On the other hand, here's a feature that would be beyond either natigve I/O
or the current state of SQL affairs: create a subset of records from an
existing result set.  Now THAT would be nice.  Here's the business issue:

1. Create a view of, say, invoices that were over 90 days, by customer and
date
2. Subselect out just the customer numbers from that set, showing them to
the user
3. Let the user pick a customer, and go back to the original result set and
then subselect for just that customer

THIS would be power.  THIS would be a real boon to programming.  Sure, you
can do it by just re-running the SELECT over the whole file, but if the
selection criteria has any complexity to it, that's a lot of churning
against the database, when you already have the data selected from the first
pass.

Joe