RE: Equivalent to Oracle's describe

I'm not sure whether it's the answer you want, but DB-Access can be used in a non-interactive mode and understands the INFO command: dbaccess dbase - <<! INFO COLUMNS FOR sometable; ! Note that INFO is not an ESQL/C command; it is understood only by DB-Access and ISQL and is handled by those programs internally. It is fairly straightforward to handle pre-IUS data types, but the IUS extended data types are much more difficult. Also, the SQLCMD program in the IIUG archives (http://www.iiug.org) can show the column names and (pre-IUS) types of query results - use 'sqlcmd -HT' or the 'headings on' and 'types on' built-in commands. You could filch the conversion code from there. DB-Access doesn't display the types of query results, of course. The most important information comes from the ColType and ColLength columns in the 'informix'.SysColumns table, but there is a lot of encoding of the information. The Informix Guide to SQL: Reference has a chapter on the system catalogue. What more do you want in the way of information? Having the ESQL/C headers will often make it a little easier to understand what's going on with the more complex data types (meaning DATETIME and INTERVAL). Does anybody have code to interpret the extended IUS data types? If so, can I see it? Yours, Jonathan Leffler (jleffler@visa.com) #include <bother.ms-exchange.h> ---------- From: James Cooper[SMTP:pixel@organic.com] Sent: Monday, March 16, 1998 11:11 PM I'm new to the Informix world, and miss the "describe" command in Oracle that displays the column names and datatypes for a given table or view. I realize that if I run dbaccess in its menu driven mode that I can get this information, but for whatever reason I'm just not that into the fancy ASCII menus. Also, can anyone recommend a good reference for the Informix system catalog? I imagine I could answer my first question above if I knew which catalog tables to look in.