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IBM Informix Client SDK 2.80
(c) Copyright IBM Corporation 2002 All rights reserved.
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:
- System administrators who install the Informix OLE DB Provider
- Developers who write client applications using the Informix OLE DB Provider
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.
The OLE DB Provider is compatible with versions 7.3x, 8.3x, 9.2x, and
9.3x of the IBM Informix database server.
A comprehensive list of the problems
fixed in this release can be found in the defects
document .
Some issues with workarounds or additional information are described
below:
Using Visual Basic and ADO, a -206 error may get raised if DELIMIDENT is set to 'Y' and the table name is in upper case (Bug 156178). A case has been opened with Microsoft to deal with this situation. As a work around, define table names and other identifiers in lower case.
When using the Microsoft Analysis Manager component of SQL Server 2000 the error 'Connection Failed' may be observed (Bug 155650). A case has been opened with Microsoft to address this situation.
In order to display Unicode characters correctly in Visual Basic TextBoxes, use the TextBox control found in the Microsoft Forms 2.0 Object Library.
On Windows 2000, there may be a problem registering the IBM Informix OLE DB Provider dll during installation. If the dll is not properly registered, an application may have problems working with global transactions with MTS. In this case manually register the dll using the command "regsvr32 ifxoledbc.dll" in the $INFORMIXDIR/bin directory.
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.