Re: Building dynamic SQL with descriptors

On Sun, Sep 3, 2017 at 5:38 PM, Mike Jones <mike.jones.sysdev@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

One way or the other, if you want to handle any number of columns with any
data type and size, I think you still need to dynamically allocate the
memory at run time that will hold the data returned by the SQL engine.

Well, you could delegate the memory management to a host language that
does its own memory management. ;)

That stuff is not a trivial task, although I'm sure it would be easier
today in some respects versus back then. Working against you is the
increased number of data types present today, which increases the amount of
work to code what you want, assuming you want to support all data types.

Having fewer data types is actually kind of freeing. If the host
language just has "arbitrary-length strings" and "arbitrary-precision
numbers" you are all set to receive whatever from SQL.

(Python isn't *quite* that simple. Integers are a different type than
floating point, for example. But it is set up nicely to receive
anything from SQL.)

John Y.