Re: Current function does not work!

On Tue, 28 Jul 1998 18:10:53 -0400, "Art S. Kagel" <kagel@bloomberg.net> wrote: >Stefan Weideneder wrote: >> >> Hi Wolf, >> >> I would recommend to contact your Technical Support, because this >> behaviour looks like a BUG. > >Not a bug. For consistency during SPL execution the value of CURRENT >is frozen for the session when a Stored Procedure is started until >you complete the outermost stored procedure. > >Art S. Kagel As I have understood it this is done so due to a requirement in the ANSI standard for SQL that the value of current shouldn't change over the execution time taken by a single SQL statement. Informix have interpreted this to include execution of stored procedures. If you execute a simple select statement you wouldn't normaly want current to return different values if used multiple times. To me it's clear that both executions of current should return the same value in the following statement and must do so for every row returned: select current, updatetime from sometable where updatetime > current (Convoluted example perhaps, but you might use it to find errors in an application.) However it's a somewhat different issue in a stored procedure. I am a little doubtfull to Informix's interpretation of the ANSI standard here. Is it realy required by the ANSI standard? Are there examples where it would be required to work the way it does, or is it just an example of following a "standard" for the purpose of beeing compliant while creating more problems than that solves? I don't know the answers, so a clarification of the issues involved would be very welcome. While I think about it now you could easily get into the same kind of problems as would result from the above select statement having current executed every thime it was encountered if a stored procedure where used as part of a select statement. May be the only solution is to provide another statement that could be used inside stored procedures to return the current date and time as it was executed. It's a question of how necessary such a statement is however. For checking performance it would of course be nice, but there are other ways of doing that. Are there other important uses of such a statement? Nils Myklebust NM Data AS Norway E-mail: Nils.Myklebust@nmdata.com FAQ at: http://www.iiug.org/techinfo/faq/faq_top.html (Now with ODBC info under "Third party products".)