sybperl-l Archive

From: Ashu Joglekar <ajogleka at ltcm dot com>
Subject: Re: Accessing @@rowcount global variable
Date: Jul 21 1998 6:57PM

On a less philosophical note :-) @@rowcount is most useful inside a stored
procedure to check if an update statement worked :

update table
if (@@rowcount = 0)
    print "oops"

Or, sometimes you need to delete/update a big old table in a batch by setting
the rowcount to a small enough number that won't fill up the log and then
looping until @@rowcount = 0.

This thread reminds me of the time I asked a Sybase engineer the same question
(8 years ago). His analogy was "You want me to tell you how much money I have in
my pocket. I don't know how much I have, so I have to pull out my wallet, count
my money and then tell you how much I have. If you want me to give you all the
money, then  I have to count it while giving it to you."

Or something like that :-)
Ashu