Re: SQL statements for physical and logical files

Buck,

I can see where this argument can start to get religious. As far as
totally abandoning RLA just so that you can avoid a record format level
check I can see some not grooving to that. Like, maybe they use a vendor
package and adding columns on the fly is just not something done lightly.

I have however used programs with SQL only when others would probably have
used RLA. But that was for a program which touched files in multiple
vendor versions and that format level check would have been onerous.
There's always some way to work around it and stick with RLA but that's
going to the other religious extreme.

And I seriously do not buy the argument that if you're using a cursor you
are using SQL wrong.

One of our major vendor packages, Infor, uses LF's on all their physicals
and their RLA never touches the physicals. And their LF's never select
all columns. I have taken a copy of one of their tables and added columns
needed for Temporal Table support and I did not redo the LF nor the RPG
programs using RLA. Worked fine. There's a lot I disagree with them
about database design, a serious whole lot, but that was nice to have.


Rob Berendt