RE: Silly question time -- with answer (long)

I'm glad I qualified my previous response with "I haven't tested it...". Today, I went and tested it, and much to my surprise, running a query against the system catalog of a MODE ANSI database with an unquoted owner name of informix does work; OnLine actively case-converts the owner to lower case when the owner is user 'informix'. SELECT * FROM informix.systables; SELECT * FROM Informix.systables; On the other hand, this does not work for other users. So, to contradict myself, user informix does get special treatment. Indeed, if a DBA creates a table owned by user informix, it still gets handled specially: CREATE TABLE 'informix'.sometable ( col01 SERIAL NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY, col02 CHAR(20) NOT NULL ); SELECT * FROM informix.sometable; I suppose this will be misinterpreted as "it is a good idea to create tables in a MODE ANSI database with owner 'informix'". I disagree with this, but you will probably get away with it if you decide to take the lazy way out. I think you should never create tables owned by user informix and you should accept the discipline of getting the owner name quoted properly. And, since there were some questions about who uses MODE ANSI databases, the last system I assembled used a MODE ANSI database for its main activities, though it also accesses a non-logged database (created before I got any say in the matter) using two separate connections, of course. The main database needed to have transactions in place; the automatic isolation level and the automatic transactions were advantages for the application-a small web based data entry/report system. Yours in learning mode, Jonathan Leffler (jleffler@visa.com) #include <bother.ms-exchange.h> >---------- From: Jonathan Leffler[SMTP:jleffler@earthlink.net] >Sent: Friday, April 24, 1998 9:42 PM >ANTS wrote: >> I wonder in mode ANSI databases, when you write owner.tablename >> owner will be capitalized (because of ANSI) and you get table >> not found error msg. BUT if you write informix.tablename, informix >> won't be capitalized and you get the correct results?? >> Any ideas?? Does informix get special treatments? >No, I don't think the user informix gets special treatment. I admit >that I have not checked today that you have to write >"informix".SysTables to refer to the primary table in the catalogue, >but I'm pretty sure you have to do so.