OID in informix

I want to know if the use of the OID (does informix have OID for identification of the lines?) for identification of the line in the table, so I can relate it on another table. If I delete a line of the table, how does it affect the OID of the other lines, especially the ones below? Thanks -- "And I'm happy, because you make me feel good, about me." - Melvin Udall ----------------------------------------------------------------- Mart'n Marqu's email: martin@math.unl.edu.ar Santa Fe - Argentina http://math.unl.edu.ar/~martin/ Administrador de sistemas en math.unl.edu.ar -----------------------------------------------------------------

"Martin A. Marques" wrote: > > I want to know if the use of the OID (does informix have OID for > identification of the lines?) for identification of the line in the table, so > I can relate it on another table. > If I delete a line of the table, how does it affect the OID of the other > lines, especially the ones below? I believe Martin is coming from a hierarchical or network database which uses the logical or physical address of a record to create low cost relationships between records or different record types (read tables). Martin, the relational database equivalent is to place a unique primary key into each table schema, Informix includes the types SERIAL and SERIAL8 for this purpose, and use that as a foreign key in the child record tables. Informix's equivalent of OID would be ROWID which MUST NOT BE USED as a referential key! For non-fragmented tables ROWID is the physical location of the row in the database. Art S. Kagel