re:porting informix to sybase

A few days ago somebody asked about the difficulty of porting from informix to sybase. I sent a reply, but mistyped the address, so I'll try again: The difficulty of porting SQL from Informix (or vice versa) depends to the most part on how close to ANSI standard the SQL is. Both support ANSI standard SQL, and both have extensions to it. In most cases the same thing could be accomplished without the extension, as well. As an example, both Informix and Sybase have outer joins. Sybase uses a *= or =* for its outer join, and Informix uses the word outer. I can never remember which way to construct the outer join, but, since I've had to write programs that would work against two different DBMSs, I can always remember how to retrieve the same information with a UNION, which works in either one. There are times that the extensions are pretty handy, though (I've been using MATCHES so much lately, that I'd be hard pressed to remember the proper use of % and _).