Re: Oracle is KILLING INFORMIX...

In <4s97jk$o0c@nadine.teleport.com>, markb@raysfood.com (Mark Blum) writes: >Mike: > >... > >Informix may have had a superior product, ... > > >Rick Creson > Superior? 1. If you walk through an index sorted ascending, it may go quite fast. But if you turn the other way round in a 4GL, you'll have to do a order by desc which will (re)create a temporary index taking several minutes with a few 100000 records in your table... In Oracle it won't. 2. If you have a table with 100000 rows and you just want to select the first 20 rows according to a specified condition which is supported by a fitting index, you can say in Oracle select * from rec where ordernum > 12345 and rownum <= 20; According to the SQL Reference Manual the only way to do this is to select * from rec where ordernum > 12345 and dbinfo('sqlca.sqlerrd2') <= 20; But, alas, the dbinfo is only evaluated a f t e r the select, during the select it yields the value 0. This is especially important for dialogue applications! Martin Haltmayer