in reply to Re: How NOT to do it
in thread How NOT to do it

Obviously a Windoze Axe-S guru. Racle SQL has had a length function since at least version 6

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Re:x3 How NOT to do it
by grinder (Bishop) on Mar 19, 2001 at 20:04 UTC

    Actually no, Sybase.

    You actually made me go look at the documentation. Turns out that there does exist such a function in Sybase, but it's called char_leng (talk about obvious).

    In any event, there are length functions in the various SQL dialects, but there is no such beast in the SQL standard (although it's been years since I've tracked the standard closely, SQL-92 is still pretty new-fangled for me). So much for portability.


    --
    g r i n d e r
[reply]
      But note that SQL is pretty unusual. For instance how many other programming languages do you know which, by design, are not Turing complete?

      Brownie points to the first person who can say why it is very important that SQL not be a Turing complete language. :-)

[reply]
        Since no one has answered your challenge in 2 years, I'll ask:
        Why is it very important that SQL not be a Turing complete language?
        The only answer^W guess I can come up with is the rhetorical - imagine someone trying to code an OS or any complete program in a database. But I don't really know. Thanks.

        Perl programming and scheduling in the corporate world, as explained by dragonchild:
        "Uhh ... that'll take me three weeks, broken down as follows: 1 day for coding, the rest for meetings to explain why I only need 1 day for coding."
[reply]

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