Nando Dessena wrote:

>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.
>
>
>

For what it's worth, the external table was designed to support RMS
files on VMS. Files of fixed length records with fixed datatypes just
didn't exist in the Unix world. As far as I know, with the possible
exception of c-isam, they still don't. The actual external file
handling module was designed to be replacable to handle different file
managers, but I doubt anybody ever did.

For what it's worth, the create table mechanism is way too crude to
create an ISAM file. The external table mechanism knows record length
and field lengths and offsets and almost nothing else. An RMS ISAM file
requires a bucket size, key information, index overflow information,
blah blah blah. Datatrieve did have a simple mechanism to create RMS
files, which the users loved, but I got endless shit for creating
non-optimized files that I vowed to a) spend the rest of my life
avoiding ISAM and ISAM users, b) eliminate all index parameters.