Extending INFORMIX-Universal Server: User-Defined Routines

Extending INFORMIX-Universal Server: User-Defined Routines
Introduction

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About This Manual

Extending INFORMIX-Universal Server: User-Defined Routines explains how to define your own functions and procedures for use in an INFORMIX-Universal Server database. It describes common considerations for SPL routines and external routines.

Organization of This Manual

This manual includes the following chapters:

This Introduction provides an overview of the manual and describes the documentation conventions used.
Chapter 1, "Overview of User-Defined Routines," describes user-defined routines.
Chapter 2, "Routine Overloading and Routine Resolution," describes how you can define routines with the same name and how Universal Server determines which routine to execute.
Chapter 3, "Designing a User-Defined Routine," describes how to create and register external user-defined routines.
Chapter 4, "Debugging User-Defined Routines," describes how to invoke and debug your routines.
Chapter 5, "Performance Considerations," describes performance considerations for user-defined routines.

Types of Users

This manual is written for the experienced application developer who might be creating application-specific routines for application end-users. This developer should have more understanding of database theory than a client-application developer.

This reader should have a thorough grasp of database theory, UNIX, C, and SQL.

Software Dependencies

This manual assumes that you are using INFORMIX-Universal Server, Version 9.1, as your database server.

In this manual, all instances of Universal Server refer to INFORMIX-Universal Server.

Assumptions About Your Locale

Informix products can support many languages, cultures, and code sets. All culture-specific information is brought together in a single environment, called a GLS (Global Language Support) locale.

This manual assumes that you are using the default locale, en_us.8859-1. This locale supports U.S. English format conventions for dates, times, and currency. In addition, this locale supports the ISO 8859-1 code set, which includes the ASCII code set plus many 8-bit characters such as é, è, and ñ.

If you plan to use nondefault characters in your data or your SQL identifiers, or if you want to conform to the nondefault collation rules of character data, you need to specify the appropriate nondefault locale(s). For instructions on how to specify a nondefault locale, additional syntax, and other considerations related to GLS locales, see the Guide to GLS Functionality.

Demonstration Database

The DB-Access utility, which is provided with your Informix database server products, includes a demonstration database called stores7 that contains information about a fictitious wholesale sporting-goods distributor. Sample command files are also included.

Many examples in Informix manuals are based on the stores7 demonstration database. The stores7 database is described in detail and its contents are listed in Appendix A of the Informix Guide to SQL: Reference.

The script that you use to install the demonstration database is called dbaccessdemo7 and is located in the $INFORMIXDIR/bin directory. For a complete explanation of how to create and populate the demonstration database on your database server, refer to the DB-Access User Manual.

Extending INFORMIX-Universal Server: User-Defined Routines, version 9.1
Copyright © 1998, Informix Software, Inc. All rights reserved.