Product Documentation

FairCom DB Standalone SQL Service

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ODBC Notes

FairCom Corporation has offered two different ODBC Drivers over the years:

  • The first ODBC driver, called the "FairCom 32-Bit ODBC Driver," was released in the mid 1990’s and had a version for c-tree V4 files and one for c-tree Plus V6 and later.
  • The second ODBC driver, called the "FairCom DB ODBC Driver," was released around 2003.

Many c-tree stand-alone (e.g. FPUTFGET) applications over the years have used the older "FairCom 32-Bit ODBC Driver." If you are migrating such an application to use the more powerful FairCom DB ODBC Driver, then please be aware of the following slight differences in behavior between these two drivers:

  • All table names returned by the FairCom DB ODBC Driver are as "owner.tablename". The c-tree ODBC Driver does not prepend the "owner" name to the table name.
  • The SQL_OPTION OWNER_FILE_NAMES only affects the name of the table created on disk. It determines whether the owner name is prepended to the physical table name or not. The table names returned by the FairCom ODBC driver are not affected by the SQL_OPTION setting.
  • Using the c-tree ODBC driver it was common practice to represent the symbolic table name in uppercase. You can use uppercase table names in FairCom DB SQL as long as you do not wrap them in double quotes.

    Another option is to use the SQL_OPTION DB_CASE_INSENSITIVE keyword before creating the template database and the FairCom DB SQL databases.

  • Hidden Fields: Both the c-tree and the FairCom DB ODBC drivers will not display a field whose field name given in the DODA begins with an underscore: "_". Hiding fields that are used to form keys is not recommended and may cause problems.
  • Read-Only Fields: Both the c-tree and the FairCom DB ODBC drivers will display but will not allow updates on a field whose field name given in the DODA begins with the "legacy read only" field identifier, a right square bracket: "]".

    FairCom DB SQL import does not handle this field identifier. This character is imported as part of the field name unless the -k option (skip fields not complying with conventional identifiers rules) is specified on import. However, this is an unconventional character and must be double-quoted.

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