Hi Bill,
Some responses inline..
Wildman wrote:
Rick,
Again, this is very helpful! One might well ask why single quotes are
allowed in the SYSCS_UTIL call (and in fact, Apache's examples show single
quotes in that application) but not in the SQL create table.
This is because the ANSI/ISO syntax makes a distinction between string
literals and SQL identifiers. String literals are enclosed in single
quotes. SQL identifiers are double-quoted if you need them to be
case-sensitive. It helps to keep in mind that SQL is a very old language
which goes back to the days when case-insensitive languages were still
in fashion. Mixing case-insensitive SQL with case-sensitive Java
requires some patience.
Actually, I
think the REAL question is, "Why does the SQL standard not include I/O to
load tables from files" -- this forces every database to implement this
functionality in its own, idiosyncratic way.
I suspect this is because by the time the language was standardized,
each major vendor had already solved this problem in a proprietary way.
There was no good way to harmonize these different approaches.
Hope this helps,
-Rick
-Bill
