FairCom ISQL

FairCom ISQL - Developers Guide

FairCom Interactive SQL Command Line Interface

User Guide
FairCom ISQL
Audience:	Developers
Subject:	Using the Interactive SQL (ISQL) interface to perform database operations such as data import/export
Copyright:	© Copyright 2024, FairCom Corporation. All rights reserved. For full information, see the FairCom Copyright Notice.

 Interactive SQL (often referred to in this manual as ISQL) is a utility supplied with c-treeSQL that lets you issue SQL statements directly from a terminal and see results displayed at the terminal. You can use interactive SQL to:

• Learn how SQL statements work
• Test and prototype SQL statements to be embedded in programs
• Modify an existing database with data definition statements
• Perform ad-hoc queries and generate formatted reports with special ISQL formatting statements

With few exceptions, any SQL statement that can be embedded in a program can be issued in interactive SQL, including CREATE, SELECT, and GRANT statements. Interactive SQL includes an online help facility with syntax and descriptions of the supported statements.

SQL Data Load Tips

ISQL is very useful for running interactive SQL statements. As an option, it allows creating and executing scripts to automate certain operations. These scripts can be used for running DDL statements (Data Definition Language: create table, create index, alter table, etc.) and DML statements (Data Manipulation Language: insert, update, etc.). DML statements can become quite large if they must insert or update every record in a large table. ISQL is not intended for massive data load operations which require a large number of Insert statements.

FairCom provides tools that are more appropriate for manipulating large numbers of records:

• dbload loads records from an input data file into tables of a database.
• dbdump (Data Unload Utility: dbdump, dbdump - SQL Unload Utility) unload utility writes the data in a database to a file.