Re: Rowid range in Informix 7.x

David Williams <djw@smooth1.demon.co.uk> offerred: : How come ISQL forms use rowid? : : I checked in the 4GL 4.0 manuals and they RECOMMENDED using rowid!! : : Bit of an about turn huh? You find this surprising? Once upon a time, single-threaded database servers were the only way to go. That multi-threaded stuff was sheer nonsense. Of course, that was *before* Informix re-engineered the server to be multi-threaded. Then, muti-threaded was the only way to go. Times change ;-) Seriously, in practical terms, rowids were pretty useful, as they gave you quick access to rows. As long as you understood the underlying issues and acted accordingly, you were usually ok. Along came fragmentation, and suddenly rowids were no longer unique for rows in a table. From an relational database purists perspective, the only way to get a specific row out of a table should be via its primary key, which was an aspect of the data in the row. Any other identifier used to access a particular row violated the "rules" of relational databases. Dave ********** "Everybody plays the fool, sometimes."