Dmitry,

>> BTW, you *can* create
>> an external file through a create table statement.

D> IIRC, you cannot. The physical file must exist at the moment of CREATE
D> TABLE. But even if I'm right then I consider this a bug rather than a
D> feature.

It's an unconfirmed bug then. :-)
I just checked, the file needn't exist. It would be quite inconvenient
for exports.

D> Server-wide SQL is handy for some
D> tasks. But it requires site login and connection context. I.e. it doesn't
D> make sense to use the current API which is database-bound. Perhaps a new
D> isc_service_execute_sql() call would do the trick - it would use the already
D> established (via isc_service_attach) services connection and parse the given
D> SQL to create the appropriate SPB buffers and execute the necessary service
D> internally. Just a nice SQL wrapper for the services API. Comments?

Looks workable, although I'm not at all sure that the main
"database-bound" API isn't suitable for the task. I'll concede that
since the services API is already here then it's a better fit, but if
it was to be implemented from scratch I'd think twice about using the
isc_attach_database & c. API (for services as well, probably).

Ciao
--
Nando Dessena
http://www.flamerobin.org