Tim/Mark You both make good points. Mark was responding to a specific requirement (how to get a single field for a single record) with one working and largely cross platform solution. Obviously getting a tranch of data requires a different solution. I don't think Mark was seriously suggesting that a million executes is a way to go.
Personally I would now look towards XML as that seems to be the best current option for integrating the enquiry and development languages - finally something native to close that gap in the PICK model - though in the past I have used everything from REFORMAT (slow but predicatable) to creating compound I Descriptors of the form: CONVERT(@FM:@VM:@SVM,CHAR(1):CHAR(2):CHAR(3),field1:@FM:field2:@FM ...) etc and doing a SELECT .. SAVING that descriptor. Each ReadNext then gets an entire row - just CONVERT() the delimiters back again - and the result is extremely fast. Doesn't work well with WHEN clauses though - but then few things really do :( Tim's point about DOWNLOAD does have some merit. But Mark is an old pro (sorry, forgive the 'old' bit ! ) and I'm sure he writes his utilities in a way that other developers can work out what they do <grin>. Calling a utility without looking to see how it works first - well that's just lazy. And it's not just MV that will screw up in those cases! You wouldn't expect to call a SQL Server or Oracle stored procedure without some DBA's approval, would you? Brian ------- u2-users mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe please visit http://listserver.u2ug.org/
