Informix Online Documentation

Licensed Materials - Property of IBM

"Restricted Materials of IBM"
 

IBM Informix Client SDK 2.80
(c) Copyright IBM Corporation 2002 All rights reserved.
 


RELEASE NOTES FOR
IBM Informix OLE DB Provider
Date: 6/06/2002
Version: 2.80

Table of Contents
  1. Overview
  2. Installation Notes
  3. IBM Informix Database Server Compatibility
  4. Problems Fixed at this Release 
  5. Known Problems
  6. Changes in Behavior

I. Overview of Release Notes

The purpose of these release notes is to make you aware of any special actions required to configure and use Informix OLE DB Provider on your computer. This file also describes new features and feature differences from earlier versions of this product. In addition, this file contains information about known bugs and their workarounds.

This release notes document is not intended to be all-inclusive; it should be used as an addendum to the Informix OLE DB Provider Programmer's Guide, which provides thorough information about product features and behavior.

These release notes are written for the following audience:


II.Installation Notes 

The use of OLE DB requires that the MDAC runtime libraries exist on your system.  The version of MDAC that we are redistributing with this release is 2.5.  If your system does not have MDAC runtime components or if they are older than this version, it will be installed on your system.


 
III. IBM Informix Database Server Compatibility
 

The OLE DB Provider is compatible with versions 7.3x, 8.3x, 9.2x, and 9.3x of the IBM Informix database server.
 

 

IV. Problems Fixed in this Release

A comprehensive list of the problems fixed in this release can be found in the defects document .


V. Known Problems

Some issues with workarounds or additional information are described below:
 



VI Changes in Behavior from the Previous Release

This version represents a major revision of the provider and there are multiple differences between this version and prior versions.  For the most part, the differences can be considered to be part of an effort to make the provider behave in a manner more consistent with the IBM Informix ODBC driver.

There is a change in the behavior of the provider in how it handles interval types.  In the previous versions of the provider, interval data was returned as decimal numbers, with different sections of that number corresponding to the different year, month, day, etc. fields of the value.  Knowledge of the start and end fields of the interval column was required in order to interpret the decimal number correctly, however. In this release, the default type will be a string with the format as described in the SQL Reference manual, with the provision that a conversion to a numeric type will also be allowed. If an interval is requested in DBTYPE_I8 format, the number returned will have 1/100,000 seconds as the unit of measure.

There is a change in behavior in this release in how the provider supports complex data types, collections and row types. Data of these types is presented in string format as LVARCHAR data. This is similar to the method that is used to interact with this data using the dbaccess tool. As an example of the format
being presented:

   A column has the definition:

   my_date     MULTISET(date not null);

   Data contained in this column will be returned to the application in the
   format:

   MULTISET{'08/15/2000','02/02/2002','10/11/1999'}

This version of the provider does not directly support Opaque or Distinct data types.  In order to access data of type Opaque from a Visual Basic ADO program, it should be mapped to the OLE DB type DBTYPE_BYTES.  In order to access data of type Distinct, it should be mapped to the base underlying type (DBTYPE_STR, DBTYPE_I4, DBTYPE_NUMERIC, etc.).

Character Large Object (CLOB) data does not go through code set conversion when being passed to and from the server in this release.  It will remain in the original CLIENT_LOCALE.
 


Informix OLE DB Provider
Copyright (c) 2002, Informix Software, Inc. All rights reserved