MetaQuestions: better SQL tutorials and Informix documentation
Posted in 1999
First of all, I'd like to thank everyone for welcoming me to this
newsgroup/list, and for all the warm and helpful comments.
I'm going to be (nominally) obnoxious and ask two more meta-questions:
*I've seen a LOT of free SQL tutorials on the web that deal with
SELECT/UPDATE/INSERT, equijoins, ALTER TABLE, primary keys, the
concept of uniqueness, etc.... and even one that deals with nested
SELECTs. These are all great, but I haven't seen any that deal with
constraint checking, foreign keys, procedures, schemas, cursors,
etc... Does anyone know of a tutorial that deals with these more
complicated concepts and/or actually works you through building a real
application, even a small one?
*Is it possible to get Informix' documentation in HTML format? I know
it's available in PDF format, but this is unwieldy for me (I've tried
using "pdf2html@access.adobe.com" to convert it, but it didn't
work). Barring that, is it possible to purchase printed documentation
from Informix?
To briefly answer the questions asked earlier by various folks:
*I'm currently using the free version of Informix-SE. It's great to
see a free SQL server [sidebar: when I first heard/read about SQL, I
thought it wouldn't be hard to implement an SQL server-- but then when
I looked around I couldn't find ANY free SQL servers and began to
realize how hard it was-- I don't count msql and the like since they
specifically admit to not being full-fledged SQL servers (no nested
selects for example)-- I began to realize it must be harder than I
thought!]. Having a free SQL server is great. Unfortunately, I can't
afford to upgrade to anything other than Informix-SE, so I'll need to
get my applications to run on it.
*I am aware of dbaccess -- in fact, that's the ONLY way I know of to
talk to the db server-- are there others (ok, I assume you can write a
ESQL/C program that makes library calls to access the db, but are
there any other direct ways to access the db server?)
Thanks!