Re: Should I use dbaccess or isql ?

In message <25bda1a5.0305282220.36359e20@posting.google.com>, joseph v d'silva <j_v_dsilva@www.com> writes >Hi, > > Our DBA has advised us to use isql and not dbaccess. He says that >the later has a chance of corrupting informix file system ( not sure >if that was the term he used ). But our problem is that isql always >returns 0 even for errors, and redirecting the ouput to some log file >and grep ing for all sorts of thing seems to be the only workaround >with isql, but that seems quite a bit unprofessional and dirty coding >to me, and we do a lot of database access from shell scripts, so this >work around is also very tedious and there is every chance of messing >up things, on the other hand dbaccess returns error code which can be >used in shell scripts to write a more legible, easily maintanable code >.... but our DBA says otherwise.. > > can some one tell me the facts on dbaccess vs isql or any other >workarounds ...? > >Thanx If you're writing general purpose scripts, remember that isql may not be installed on all machines. I can't believe that dbaccess is more likely to cause corruption. If anything, it may be the other way around if the isql you're using is way out of date. Also, dbaccess has the DBACCNOIGN environment variable to stop execution at the first error. Is that, or similar, functional in isql. I can't test it, as I don't have isql... Finally, you could use some other scripting solution, perl, tcl, ... -- Andrew Lennard andy@kontron.demon.co.uk