Re: dbaccess
Yes, buy Oracle - that does this as standard. And to be frank it's a mess!
Let's try to understand why it is a mess on oracle.
Firstly, when you select columns from a table you want to read the required
information - which means that you convert binary to printable numerics, you
add spaces between columns, and you convert dates to character strings etc.
All that is implied by the select * from tablename. So, if the resultant
output gives ore than 80 characters then you need to wrap to another line.
And if it exceeds 160 a third line is needed, etc.
I have seen many tables where the condensed row size is more than 250 bytes
and some where the condensed row size even exceeds 2K. A 2K row size would
take in excess of 25 lines to display one record, and that is more than a
screenful.
Informix gave this a great deal of thought when planning their system and
decided that if a user was doing a select statement in SQL then the
readability of the output was important. They came up with an algorithm
that says "for each column the resultant column width is the maximum of the
length of the column-name or the column character width". Add theresultant
column widths for each column and the number of columns -1 for a single
space character between each column. If the result is greater than 80 then
display one column per line else display one row per line.
You can get the sort of thing you want by UNLOAD TO "file.out" DELIMITER
" " SELECT * FROM systables
It's not pretty and there are no column headings. Also, trailing spaces are
removed from character strings, leading characters are removed from
numerics, etc. So it isn't tabular. But with careful choice of a delimiter
and piping the output though one of the system utilities on UNIX you can get
a reasonably tabular output.
Having worked for many years on 3rd generation systems where the standard
for file display was the Orcale way I found Informix's fourth generation
approach much easier to work with.
regards
Malcolm Weallans
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mitja Udovc" <mitja.udovc@zrs-tk.si>
To: <informix-list@iiug.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 07, 2003 8:32 AM
Subject: dbaccess
> When I make SELECT * from systables I get:
>
> tabname pcr_users
> owner informix
> partnum 1048702
> tabid 137
> rowsize 377
> ncols 10
> nindexes 2
> nrows 33
> created 03-07-02
> version 9043971
> tabtype T
> locklevel P
> npused 3
> fextsize 16
> nextsize 16
> flags 0
> site
> dbname
> type_xid 0
> am_id 0
>
> tabname pcr_sled_last
> owner informix
> partnum 1048706
> tabid 139
> rowsize 34
> ncols 7
> nindexes 4
> nrows 1765067
> created 03-08-05
> version 9633794
> tabtype T
> locklevel R
> npused 33304
> fextsize 100000
> nextsize 100000
> flags 0
> site
> dbname
> type_xid 0
> am_id 0
> .
> .
> .
> .
> .
>
>
> I would like to have data presented in rows like that
> tabname owner partnum tabid ....
> pcr_sled_last informix ....
>
> When I have instead of * only two fields, then it is OK. Is there any way
to
> solve this?
>
>
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