sybperl-l Archive

From: Michael Peppler <mpeppler at MBAY dot NET>
Subject: Explicitly binding columns... How do I??
Date: Jun 3 1998 7:38PM

Todd E. Scheresky writes:
 > Folks,
 > 
 > I have problem which pertains to Open Client on Alpha VMS, and Sybperl.
 > There must be a Sybperl solution to this problem, though I am not sure
 > what it is.  The problem is described as follows.
 > 
 > When I execute a stored procedure, or SQL statement, that returns a
 > numeric(9,0) from CTlib ( using the CTlib/Perl code found below ) Perl
 > dies a horrible death.  The VMS error output follows the CTlib/Perl
 > code.  Note: I am not doing any explicit binding in my Sybperl code, and
 > the same stored procedure executes fine in Sybperl on Windows NT 4.0 and
 > Unix.  It has been determined that Open Client on Alpha VMS defaults to
 > binding a numeric to a IEEE floating point data type, instead of the
 > native VMS data type, which causes and overflow on Alpha architecture.
 > 
 > My question is how do tell Sybase Server, from Sybperl, to returns all
 > my result set as strings?  What would be the most elegant Sybperl
 > solution to this problem?
 > 
 > Any help, or sane suggestion, is appreciated!!

There's no "clean" solution at this point. Sybase::DBlib has the
dbKeepNum attribute which you can set to 0 to return everything as
strings, but Sybase::CTlib doesn't have this.

However, all is not lost.

In CTlib.xs, go to line 1146 (at least that's what I have) - where you 
will find the following code:

	  case CS_NUMERIC_TYPE:
	  case CS_DECIMAL_TYPE:
	    /* FIXME:
	       Should this be DoChar: when not using native numeric
	       formats (overflow problems...)? */
	    if(!use_numeric)
		goto DoFloat;
	    info->datafmt[i].maxlength = sizeof(CS_NUMERIC);
	    info->datafmt[i].datatype = CS_NUMERIC_TYPE;
	    info->datafmt[i].format   = CS_FMT_UNUSED;
	    info->coldata[i].type = CS_NUMERIC_TYPE;
	    retcode = ct_bind(info->cmd, (i + 1), &info->datafmt[i],
			      &info->coldata[i].value.num,
			      &info->coldata[i].valuelen,
			      &info->coldata[i].indicator);
	    break;
	    

Change the goto to be DoChar instead of DoFloat and you should get
strings instead of floats returned to you from numberic/decimal data.

Michael
-- 
Michael Peppler         -||-  Data Migrations Inc.
mpeppler@datamig.com    -||-  http://www.mbay.net/~mpeppler
Int. Sybase User Group  -||-  http://www.isug.com