I wish the ODBC driver:

- support right joins as well as left joins (I assuming the latter works, due to the next wish)
- had documentation in plain English
- supported exploded sorts
- had a TOP or a LIMIT clause, so that the whole textbase doesn't have to be selected when you only want the latest few records
- supported subqueries
- supported INSERTing/UPDATing more than 2000 characters
- supported field lengths greater than 8191 characters, despite what the documentation says
- allowed you to ORDER BY more than 5 fields
- had a function which returned the automatic id for the most recently created record

[This message has been edited by Rick Mason (edited 08 August 2002).]

Which version of the ODBC driver are you using? The current version (3.0) does support inserting/updating more than 2000 characters and field lengths greater than 8K.

I'll enter your other requests.

[This message has been edited by Lisa (edited 06 August 2002).]

The ODBC 3.0 driver does support subqueries.

Lisa

Thanks for following up my requests.

The 2000 character limit certainly exists with a standard INSERT/UPDATE command, but over in the ODBC forum it seems that using the driver in a different way may work around the problem. If so, I'd update my wishlist request to have a relevant error message when more than 2000 characters are entered instead of "Lexical element not found", which usually indicates a syntax error.

When I use the [ODBCFields] section of a textbase INI file to specifically set a field to LONGTEXT with a length of greater than 8191 characters, then load a page which tries to SELECT that field, Internet Information Server crashes. Change the INI back to 8191 or less and there's no problem.

Could you indicate where in the documentation the support for subqueries is explained, or indeed mentioned? Maybe this is just another example of why better documentation is on my wishlist. If the documentation can't be updated, perhaps some articles could be added to the knowledgebase?

In the "ODBC and SQL Conformance" section of DBTODBC3.HLP, there are several listings of supported subqueries in the "comparison" and "insertvals" sections, unless you mean something different by subqueries. For example:

expression IN (SELECT select )

I think subquery support may also be covered by the brief "ODBC API Conformance" and "SQL Conformance" sections at the top of that page. I.e., subqueries may be part of various supported items listed (ODBC 3.0 core, DDL, DML, etc.). I'm not an ODBC/SQL expert, so I'm actually not sure.

I have passed on your comments to the documentation department.

[This message has been edited by Lisa (edited 08 August 2002).]

Thank you Lisa. It seems my wish was for documentation after all.

It seems odd to me that features like this, which increase the scope of DB/Textworks, are not shouted about more by InMagic.

There's not a peep in the list of new features in the new driver's readme, unless you count "ODBC 3.0 compliance" or "Level 2 (most) API". Okay, that may include subqueries and a host of other features, but why not talk up your new features yourselves instead of referring users to other people's technical documentation?

The 2000 character limit was eventually resolved in thread http://support.inmagic.com/ubb/Forum6/HTML/000008.html with seemingly-undocumented syntax.

[This message has been edited by Rick Mason (edited 21 January 2003).]