Re: Matching Records

Joe Pluta wrote:

Gotta call BS on this one, Adam <grin>. Look at my complete program
compared to what is in effect just the query in SQL. See how many times I
have to define fields or matches.

I was just teasing Joe. Not saying that mine was better than yours. In either case, I think that there would be some 'gotchas' that would make it take a little thought unless you use the technique regularly.

With your UNION and the two JOINs,
there's a whole lot of field enumeration going on, and you still don't have
the code that identifies which records are matching, or found in only one
file. And you still haven't written the report!

I didn't see any O-Specs in yours. Lim's suggestion for the non-matching part of the query was pretty straightforward, and as Charles suggested I was getting more fancy than necessary by enumerating the fields to select when I could have used 'select *'.

You still need to create a
cursor or run through a result set and print it, not exactly negligible.

It is if you do it regularly, just like remembering the minutiae of MR syntax is not negligible if you aren't writing that kind of program often.

Sure, we had some giggles trying to remember the exact syntax, but I
basically had the thing right (with the exception of the *IN02) from the
beginning. Compare that to the various issues we had with LEFT EXCEPTION
JOIN vs. RIGHT EXCEPTION JOIN, and I'm still thinking that the matching
records was a lot easier.

Again, once you get over the initial hurdle of grokking (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok) it, either method becomes simple.

I think this is a clear case of "to each their own".