At 07:50 PM 7/05/2004 +1000, you wrote:

> > Umm....dialect has rather a lot to do with the SQL you can use. Both
> > dialect 1 and dialect 3 are "standard" (more or less) but in
> > dialect 1 you
> > are limited to InterBase 5's SQL language set (less, actually). Alan, if
> > you haven't been using d1 databases, you'll be quite astonished
> > by what you
> > can't do in d1. :-> If you write apps that use language features that
> > only d3 has, and try to run them against a d1 database, you will get some
> > unpleasant surprises.
> >
> > /heLen
> >
>
>Ok you've got me Helen - apart from new datatypes (Int64 and Date) and
>delimited identifiers. What are these other differences?
>I don't mean the difference between SQL89 and SQL92 - that's not what
>dialect means here.
>I'd love to know what you are referring to

A cheeseboard for you, Alan. :-)

create table "sunshine" (
"select" varchar(10),
"washing day" date);
ISC ERROR CODE:335544569

ISC ERROR MESSAGE:
Dynamic SQL Error
SQL error code = -104
Token unknown - line 1, char 14
"sunshine"

d1
select 10/3 as one_third from rdb$database;
one_third
=================
3.333333333333333
(this isn't SQL standard, btw)

d3
select 10/3 as one_third from rdb$database;
one_third
=================
3

d1
select cast(current_timestamp as char(10)) as just_the_date
from rdb$database
just_the_date
==========
7-MAY-2004

d3
select cast(current_timestamp as char(10)) as just_the_date
from rdb$database
ISC ERROR CODE:335544321

ISC ERROR MESSAGE:
arithmetic exception, numeric overflow, or string truncation