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Message Posted: Fri, 29 Apr 2005 @ 08:40:37 GMT

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Guys,

yet once more it's the ever popular "Why do I lose my format-clause instructions" when using SQL-Assitant. So far I was always content to believe that it was a problem with ODBC. But now a collegue pointed out to me that FORMAT works fine with Interagate, even using an ODBC connection.

Looking through the archives I found the following in an old thread on the topic:

"The data is sent to ODBC in a Binary format... but the application can request the ODBC driver to return it in either binary encoded or character format, as they wish."

This explaination was provided by Mike Dempsky & if it comes to SQL Assitant I just take his word for it ;)

But doesn't this mean, that SQL Assistant could honor the Format-Clause too? Would it not just need a setting of some sort to receive the answer as character format, rather than binary encoded? Is there a downside to doing this?

The upside I'm seeing is that one could better develop queries intended to run in BTEQ on SQL Assistant. With the format-clause not being honored people tend to explicitely cast the data to char just to see the results in the format they whish. Obviously this is not necessary when running on BTEQ, but it's easy to forget & just keep the cast in (thus consuming resources on the RDBMS unnecessarily.)

What are your thoughts?

Mirjam

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