Re: Sum() function

Felt compelled to respond to your tangental comment. True, this style of abstracting vendor specific syntax was introduced in ODBC, but it has since been adopted by JDBC, OLE DB and from what I can tell, .Net providers. Which means that basically all DB app development using any MS product (Query, Access, Excel, Visual Basic (6), Visual Studio/VB 7, etc.) or Java has the potential to use curly-brace escape sequences. If your search for jobs where these are mentioned, I'm pretty sure that you'll find that ones where skill in these are required far outweigh those where ESQL/C or 4GL are. I'm making the leap from job market to new app development areas, but it would seem that the barbarians have overrun the empire, such as it was. And yes, amazingly enough, the sequences that are commonly used are all the same across all these environments. -Chris Jonathan Leffler <jleffler@earthlink.net> wrote in message news:<6djZb.1119$yZ1.84@newsread2.news.pas.earthlink.net>... >Since you're using ODBC, the barbarous {fn ...} notation is OK, I >suppose,