August 14, 2000

Differences in Execution Flow

Question: Why would a program not yield any errors, and yet not run on one system, while resulting in a perfect run (unchanged) on another system? Specifically, a switch statement was completely ignored on my system, yet functioned accurately on my professor’s. Answer: Yes, it’s possible to have the same

Exporting Informix

Question: I need to migrate Informix data to an Oracle database. The current application front end imports with CSV files. Can Informix export to a CSV file? Answer: There is not a CSV export, per se, but you can get close by using the DELIMITER construct: UNLOAD to flatfilename DELIMITER

Function Returning Character Position Within String

Question: Is there a function in Informix equivalent to Oracle’s instr() that returns the position of a character within a string? Also, is there a function that counts the number of times a given character repeats within a string? Answer: Neither of these Oracle-specific functions are SQL-92 compliant. Informix does

ODBC drivers for Informix IDS 9.2

Question: We are trying to get our application to work with Informix using ODBC, and we are having repeated failures. We cannot seem to access “memo” (large text) fields of any type using the supplied ODBC driver, version 3.31. We are on an NT system, and we have tried both

Using Ports with Informix

Question: From a Windows system I am trying to connect to an Informix database running on a Sun Solarix box, which was just moved behind a firewall. The Windows machine is running Access and using ODBC. It appears that the client chooses a random port to connect to the server

Chunk is Down

Question: We are using IDS 7.30 FC7 on DEC/Unix 4.2. Two separate OnLine works on the same machine. Let’s call them OnLine1 and OnLine2. While adding a new chunk (not mirrored) to the existing dbspace on the OnLine1 we specified its path to another chunk (not mirrored) which exists on

Error in Visual Studio Data View with CLI 2.40

Question: I have installed the Informix-CLI SDK 2.40 (driver ODBC rev. 3.31) both in Windows 98se and NT 4 sp4, and I’ve encountered a problem with Visual Studio Data View when try to see tables from an Informix DB running on an AIX 4.3 host. I have problems with numeric

Join on Key Fields of Differing Data Types

Question: I am trying to create some reports with a third party reporting tool accessing an Informix 7 database, which was not written by us. I want to join two tables, but the key field is a char in one table and numeric in the other. This would be a

Using Mapinfo with Informix

Question: I want to use Mapinfo with an Informix database, but I can’t connect the database server from Mapinfo. The Informix dynamic server version is 5.0. My network protocol is tcp/ip, and the database server is working on a “sco 3.2.5.0” platform. Mapinfo is working on Windows98. What can I