pritchaj@thor.acc.stolaf.edu (John Pritchard) (01/10/90)
The college I work for purchased the INGRES database system last summer, and we have recently begun working with release 6.2 on VAX VMS systems. It seems to me there are several "holes" in the tool set; that is, there are several essential utilities that are missing. I would like to hear from anyone who has built similar utilities, toward the possibility of an application trade as well as swapping experiences. We are working on a portable application to export an INGRES table into a text file in standard comma separated value (CSV) format. This is the "mail merge" format, used by most microcomputer word processors and spreadsheets (Lotus .PRN files). We considered doing this with the COPY command and then with a 3GL Pascal program, but for speed have started in the 4GL with a simple application. Does this ring any bells? Sande Nissen Carleton College, MN snissen@carleton.edu
pritchaj@thor.acc.stolaf.edu (John Pritchard) (01/10/90)
The college I work for purchased the INGRES database system last summer, and we have recently begun working with release 6.2 on VAX VMS systems. It seems to me there are several "holes" in the tool set; that is, there are several essential utilities that are missing. I would like to hear from anyone who has built similar utilities, toward the possibility of an application trade as well as swapping experiences. We are considering developing an application, procedure, or report (or combination thereof) that would generate a crosstab-style report on any INGRES table, given the column to summarize, type of summary, column across the top, and column down the left. Does this ring any bells? Sande Nissen Carleton College, MN snissen@carleton.edu
pritchaj@thor.acc.stolaf.edu (John Pritchard) (01/10/90)
The college I work for purchased the INGRES database system last summer, and we have recently begun working with release 6.2 on VAX VMS systems. It seems to me there are several "holes" in the tool set; that is, there are several essential utilities that are missing. I would like to hear from anyone who has built similar utilities, toward the possibility of an application trade as well as swapping experiences. We are considering a portable application or procedure to import a text file that is in standard comma separated value (CSV) format into an INGRES table. This is the "mail merge" format, used by most microcomputer word processors and spreadsheets (Lotus .PRN files). The COPY command can import data from text files, but there are two problems: 1) the user has to specify every column and its format, when the table may already be defined ion the systems catalogs, and 2) COPY's handling of embedded delimiters (by escaping them) won't handle CSV. Does this ring any bells? Sande Nissen Carleton College, MN snissen@carleton.edu
pritchaj@thor.acc.stolaf.edu (John Pritchard) (01/10/90)
The college I work for purchased the INGRES database system last summer, and we have recently begun working with release 6.2 on VAX VMS systems. It seems to me there are several "holes" in the tool set; that is, there are several essential utilities that are missing. I would like to hear from anyone who has built similar utilities, toward the possibility of an application trade as well as swapping experiences. We are considering a portable application or procedure(s) to provide the basic functionality of the non-standard SQL ALTER TABLE command. This includes renaming tables and columns, adding and deleting columns, resizing columns, and possibly changing the datatype of columns. A Tech Note explains how to do this with CREATE TABLE AS, but the steps are tedious and prone to error, for occasional users. Does this ring any bells? Sande Nissen Carleton College, MN snissen@carleton.edu
rogerk@mips.COM (Roger B.A. Klorese) (01/11/90)
In article <10480@thor.acc.stolaf.edu> snissen@carleton.edu () writes: >The COPY command can import data from text files, but there are two >problems: 1) the user has to specify every column and its format, when >the table may already be defined ion the systems catalogs... That's because you're specifying the format in which they appear in the input stream. For example, if I define a field as a two-byte integer in the CREATE TABLE command and as a five-byte character string in my COPY command, the conversion is performed, but if I call it two-byte integer in the input stream, it is expected to be binary data. The format of the field in the table has no bearing (barring illegal conversions) on the format in the input file. >...and 2) COPY's >handling of embedded delimiters (by escaping them) won't handle CSV. True... does your exporter allow tab-separation? -- ROGER B.A. KLORESE MIPS Computer Systems, Inc. phone: +1 408 720-2939 928 E. Arques Ave. Sunnyvale, CA 94086 rogerk@mips.COM {ames,decwrl,pyramid}!mips!rogerk "Two guys, one cart, fresh pasta... *you* figure it out." -- Suzanne Sugarbaker