How can I format display of a DATETIME column in ISQL Perform?.. and other 4.10 related questions

Question

Informix-SE 4.10.DD6, Informix-SQL 4.10.DC1 Perform screen:

1) I have column defined as DATETIME HOUR TO MINUTE and when I display it in ISQL Perform screen its default format is HH:MM (24-hour time). I would like to display it as HH:MM (am/pm). Perform format attribute only applies to DATE and DECIMAL datatypes. How can I format display for DATETIME?

2) Can I define VARCHAR, TEXT and BYTE datatypes in 4.10? I noticed a "View" command in Perform for viewing BLOBS, how does Perform know which BLOB to display?

3) When I ported my SE 2.10.06E files to SE 4.10.DD6 I noticed that "pcuser". was prefixed on each tablename and some of my SQL procs wouldn't work and SYSCONST got corrupted so I attempted a BCHECK and BCHECK wouldn't work. Are theses prefixes the table-owner?.. So I dbschema'ed and unloaded all my tables in 2.10, re-created database and tables in 4.10, loaded all tables and was able to access them with no problem, however BCHECK and SQL procs still dont work.

4) Anyone might have ISQL 4.10 manuals they could share with me?.. Even the 4.10U (UNIX)manuals would be a big help if you dont have the 4.10 (DOS) manuals!

Answer 1

1. In ISQL 7.x, you'd have an outside chance of managing to display a time in the 12-hour clock, but basically, ISQL does not really support it and in ISQL 4.10, you have no built-in options at all. However, if you want to get creative, you can consider showing the data in a DISPLAYONLY field (with the actual data in an off-the-main-screen field) and then have an instruction that controls the display of the time. Formatting that up is non-trivial (but far from impossible), of course - 12:30 am is before 1:30 am, etc - and the reverse conversion will require care.

2. Informix SE does not support BYTE, TEXT or VARCHAR - period. (Irrelevant detail for the nit-pickers - SELECT "" FROM SomeWhere returns a VARCHAR(1).)

3. Yes, 'pcuser' is the owner prefix. Gosh - were MODE ANSI databases with owners introduced in 4.00? I thought that was earlier, but I could be wrong. Anyway, I do remember that the DB-Schema output started adding user names everywhere - I still have a shell script that writes a couple of ACE reports on the fly for generating an owner-less schema. That dates back to this era (late 80s). BCHECK should work on any C-ISAM files in a database - if it doesn't, then you most probably have files which are sufficiently corrupted that BCHECK cannot make head or tail of them, but that's relatively unusual. It might not have been as reliable in those days - but my experience with BCHECK has always been that if the information was salvageable, it salvaged the data.

4. Probably not. I've just remembered I have some mid-90s doc CDs (currently with 'Legal'; they needed some old documentation for some litigation - I must ask for the CDs back). You might just be in some luck for 4.x; I'm 99% sure they don't have any earlier manuals (2.x; there never was a 3.x version of the SQL-based products - until CSDK 3.x was released, anyway; and thereby hangs another story, for another time).