Skip to main content

VFP 9 SQL and Industry Standards (by John Koziol)

John Koziol is calling on the FoxPro community to bang on the new SQL features in the Visual FoxPro 9 beta.

I posted a few of those changes yesterday and there are more to come.

If you've got a lot of tables, try it out.

John - one thing that was commented by Frank Camp was that with the removal of all these limitations, the amount of code that can be on a single line is going to be an issue. The max length is still 8192 characters and if you have to specify the individual fields, it's going to be an issue. I don't usually post ERs on the blog but the one thing I would hate to see in code is:

lc = "SELECT " + lcFlds + " from " +lcFrom + "....."
&lc

He also singled out Aleksey Tsingauz and David Anderson for their efforts on this.

It's great to learn more about who's making up the "handful of earnest" guys - instead of just the usual suspects we always hear about. Keep it up John!

VFP 9 SQL and Industry Standards (by John Koziol)

Comments

Hank Fay said…
Thanks for mentioning Frank's comment.

In our (Frank's and my) case, we create the views in xCase, so we aren't pasting parts of the SQL together; but we then modify it in various ways, programatically, before generating it. And in the end, it becomes &lcSQL, of course.

We were among those pushing for increasing the 9-join limit (since the VFP7 beta); but without a mechanism to programatically generate what we are capable of creating, it will be mostly for naught.

Popular posts from this blog

Elevating Project Specifications with Three Insightful ChatGPT Prompts

For developers and testers, ChatGPT, the freely accessible tool from OpenAI, is game-changing. If you want to learn a new programming language, ask for samples or have it convert your existing code. This can be done in Visual Studio Code (using GitHub CoPilot) or directly in the ChatGPT app or web site.  If you’re a tester, ChatGPT can write a test spec or actual test code (if you use Jest or Cypress) based on existing code, copied and pasted into the input area. But ChatGPT can be of huge value for analysts (whether system or business) who need to validate their needs. There’s often a disconnect between developers and analysts. Analysts complain that developers don’t build what they asked for or ask too many questions. Developers complain that analysts haven’t thought of obvious things. In these situations, ChatGPT can be a great intermediary. At its worst, it forces you to think about and then discount obvious issues. At best, it clarifies the needs into documented requirements. ...

Respect

Respect is something humans give to each other through personal connection. It’s the bond that forms when we recognize something—or someone—as significant, relatable, or worthy of care. This connection doesn’t have to be limited to people. There was an  article  recently that described the differing attitudes towards AI tools such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini (formerly Bard). Some people treat them like a standard search while others form a sort of personal relationship — being courteous, saying “please” and “thank you”. Occasionally, people share extra details unrelated to their question, like, ‘I’m going to a wedding. What flower goes well with a tuxedo?’ Does an AI “care” how you respond to it? Of course not — it reflects the patterns it’s trained on. Yet our interaction shapes how these tools evolve, and that influence is something we should take seriously. Most of us have all expressed frustration when an AI “hallucinates”. Real or not, the larger issue is that we have hi...

When A Machine Starts To Care

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Arthur C. Clarke (1962)  I first used that quote when I was starting out in the tech industry. Back then, it was a way to illustrate just how fast and powerful computers had become. Querying large datasets in seconds felt magical—at least to those who didn’t build them.  Today, we’re facing something even more extraordinary. Large Language Models (LLMs) can now carry on conversations that approach human-level fluency. Clarke’s quote applies again. And just as importantly, many researchers argue that LLMs meet—or at least brush up against—the criteria of the Turing Test.  We tend to criticize LLMs for their “hallucinations,” their sometimes-confident inaccuracies. But let’s be honest: we also complain when our friends misremember facts or recount things inaccurately. This doesn’t excuse LLMs—it simply highlights that the behavior isn’t entirely alien. In some ways, it mirrors our own cognitive limits....