Database Guide


What's new in this version?

In VisualAge Smalltalk Version 5.1, the Database feature adds support for the following:

Database data link support classes (DB/2 only)
The database data link support classes provide a means for storing file links into a database and accessing file links from a database. These classes store the information that you use to create and access data links to files. These data links give file access the same data integrity as data that is stored in the database.

Database (or data source) name value in the .ini configuration file.
The .ini configuration file now contains the keyword value for the database name (or data source name for ODBC) defined in the connection specification. You can then change the database (or data source) name in the .ini file instead of changing the code.

BigInt Data Type
The SQL data type of BIGINT supports 64-bit integers. As platforms introduce native support for 64-bit integers, the processing of large numbers with BIGINT is more efficient than processing with DECIMAL, and more precise than DOUBLE or REAL. This new data type allows:
  • Tables and views to include BIGINT columns
  • User-defined functions and procedures to pass and return BIGINT types
  • Applications to define BIGINT host variables and retrieve data into 64-bit integer types (when supported by the programming language.)
  • The range for BIGINT is --9223372036854775808 to _9223372036854775807.

See the IBM DB2 Universal Database SQL Reference and the IBM DB2 Universal Database Administration Guide for details.

New features for IBM Universal Database 6.0
Several new features are supported for IBM Universal Database 6.0:
  • Increased SQL Object Identifier Lengths -- To enable you to use more informative SQL object identifiers, DB2 Universal Database Version 6 increases the maximum length of table names, view names, summary table names, alias names and correlation names from 18 bytes to 128 bytes. The maximum length of column names has been increased from 18 bytes to 30 bytes.
  • Increased Maximum SQL Statement Length -- In DB2 Universal Database Version 6, the maximum SQL statement size is 65 535 bytes. You can use longer statements to create more complex SQL statements in your applications.

For more information on these enhancements IBM DB2 SQL Reference.

Oracle 8 Support
Oracle 8 is supported. The Oracle 8i OCI provides a wide range of new features and functions. All calls available in Release 7.3 are still supported, but they are not able to take full advantage of new Oracle 8i features. VisualAge Smalltalk 5.5 implements the Oracle 8i APIs but only supports the features that were available in VisualAge Smalltalk 5.0:
  • Increased client-side processing and reduced server-side requirements
  • Implicit prefetching of SELECT statement result set rows
  • API access to relational data
  • Reduction of the number of network round trips
  • A set of API calls for performing operations on FILEs
  • Improved national language support (NLS) capabilities
  • Migration path for existing OCI applications, and some ability to mix old and new calls within a single application
  • Improved support for multithreaded environments

For a full list of new Oracle 8 features, see the Oracle documentation.

Support for multiple result sets
Multiple result sets can be received from stored procedures.


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