Re: Reserved Words

> >Informix reserved words are such fun. > >In Ver 2.10, I had a lot of columns called text. Informix made > this a reserved > >word in V4.0. Everything broke in a most horrible fashion; I still > haven't >forgotten it. > >The moral is, don't use any words that Informix, in a > future release, may >choose to make reserved. > >I leave the achievement of this as an > exercise to the readers :) >Peter > > > I agree. I used to advise using underscores "_" in the name, but thats > not > totally correct, such as 'date_type' , 'dec_t' , 'dtime_t' and so on.... > there is even 'end-exec' with a dash! > > We have a three letter abreviation for every table so each column is > prefixed > with 'abr_' where abr = table name abreviation. (unless its a foreign > key, > then abr = table name abreviation from the primary table). > > Even our tables are assigned to an application and are prefixed with an > application abreviation. > So if the customer table belongs to the invoicing application then > customer.name becomes inv_customer.cmr_name. > > This _should_ aviod any future problems with our column names becoming > reserved. The current set of products is supposed to get around the use of reserved words by knowing the context they're used in. The current manuals do however warn you of taking it to extremes - there's an interesting discussion of the perils of using 'AS' as an identifier. akent@cix.compulink.co.uk (Andy Kent) ------------------------------------------------ Freelance Informix Database Specialist, Redland, Bristol, England