Rudderow, Evan ([log in to unmask]) wrote: : "<Elbert E Silbaugh>" <[log in to unmask]> wrote: : While I know that ODBC is supposed to shield us from these kinds of : differences, I wonder how realistic that hope is... What we (and most other vendors) have to do on attaching to an ODBC driver it have a quick conversation to check which features and functions the driver supports. Thus, when you run say Axiant or Impromptu for example, we establish what we can pass down to the driver. If you have Impromptu3 we ship an ODBCtrace tool which captures the conversation. We added this tool because of the number of problems people ran into which turned out to be ODBC driver bugs/limitations which our support people frequently had to track down for customers. : BTW, aren't SQL based databases usually touted as adhering to some kind of : standard? ODBC is a spec created by Microsoft which draws from the work of SAG, X/Open and ISO/ANSI. ODBC 2.x is the current spec level which expands upon the 1.x spec and accounts for more of the ISO SQL-92 spec. Most database vendors are close to being entry level SQL-92 conformant (some have FIPS-127 certification which uses ISO/ANSI SQL specs as it basis). Most often now, they are kind enough to document where their extensions are and in some casese include FIPS flagger support to warn/error when non-standard syntax is being parsed. However, life being like it is, vendors are also supporting features that are spec'd for intermediate and full SQL-92 as well as the SQL-92 draft. My recommendation to you if you are concerned is to buy at least two books which I recommend in the Axiant Migration books. One is by Gruber published by Sybex and the other is by Melton and Simon published by Morgan Kauffman. The former is a very cheap guide to SQL-92 and clearly denotes the levelling rules of the grammar. Melton's book does a very good job of explaining the meaning and why's of the SQL-92 standard (he was the editor for ANSI). Another worthwhile purchase is a recent book by Joe Celko published by M. Kauffman called SQL for Smarties. -- Nigel Campbell Voice: (613) 738-1338 ext 3016 P.O. Box 9707,Stn.T Business Intelligence FAX: (613) 738-0002 3755 Riverside Dr. Cognos Incorporated Internet: [log in to unmask] Ottawa ON K1G 4K9 URL: http://www.cognos.com CANADA