Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucsd!ogccse!orstcs!curt3028@oce.orst.edu From: curt3028@oce.orst.edu (Curt Vandetta) Newsgroups: comp.databases Subject: General ESQL question. Message-ID: <12785@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU> Date: 29 Sep 89 20:37:15 GMT Sender: usenet@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU Reply-To: curt3028@oce.orst.edu (Curt Vandetta) Organization: College of Oceanography, Oregon State Univ., Corvallis, Or. Lines: 40 Howdy Folks, I have a question about esql, I'm working with RTI INGRES 5.0/0.6, but this question should be independent of the Database system. I want to write a function that will return n attributes from a table. The way I'm structuring it you would pass to this function the name of the table and a bitmask that says which attributes you want. I can see two ways of doing this, but I'm looking for more. 1) You could code every combination of attributes that could be requested. Which is not at all what I want to do. 2) You can select every attribute in the table and then mask out the ones that the user wants and return them. Number 2 is far better, but this Database will eventually grow into a networked Database, and selecting every attribute will put to much of a demand on the network. What I would like (and can't find any documentation that says I can or can't do it) is to make the embedded select statement select a variable for it's attributes. Example: Currently in Ingres you would say: exec sql select attribute1, attribute2,... What I want is to say: exec sql select Variable where Variable is declared to be an array of char *'s or just an array of attributes seperated by white spaces. It would be up the programmer (me) to build Variable and verify that it had legal attributes in it. IS THIS POSSIBLE? or do you have any better ideas? Thanks in advance, Curt