RE: DDS to DDL

[rob@xxxxxxxxx]

Do you really need that function?  Back in the stone age RPG developers 
used to insist that all columns in a table have a prefix (or a suffix) 
that indicated which file the column came from.  So, not only did you have 
6 character column limitations but two of those had to be used to indicate 
the table that the column came from.  10-15 years ago IBM allowed 10 
character column names to be used in RPGLE.  About that same time they 
also allowed F specs to do things like prefix columns, or even qualify 
them.  So, now you could say
FMyTable            prefix(MyTable.)
And your columns would appear as:
MYTABLE.ORDERNO
MYTABLE.CUSTOMER#
...
What I am getting to is why should your column in your actual table be 
named different than the column in your field reference table?  Why 
shouldn't you use ORDERNO in both the order header and the order detail 
tables?
The new prefixing and QUALIFIED handle the previous issues.  I actually 
had a canned software package that made like fields all the same and 
manually used I specs to rename fields before PREFIX and QUALIFIED.  Doing 
so then allows you to use standard database techniques like
SELECT COLUMN_NAME, TABLE_NAME, TABLE_SCHEMA, DATA_TYPE, LENGTH,
NUMERIC_SCALE
FROM syscolumns
WHERE column_name='MYCOLUMN'
A statement that works on both the i and on MS SQL Server.

SYSCOLUMNS resides in QSYS2.  Which has been part of the system library 
list for a few releases now.
This cross reference capability came out in V3 of OS/400.

Rob Berendt