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ISQL Statements
FairCom Corporation 3-5
All the examples use the same ISQL query. The query retrieves data on outstanding customer
orders. The query joins two tables, customers and orders. The examples for the TABLE state-
ment on Section 3.7.13 "
HOST or SH or !" on page 3-31 show the columns and data types for
these sample tables.
The following example shows the query and an excerpt of the results as ISQL displays them
without the benefit of any query-formatting statements:
Example 3-1: Unformatted Query Display from ISQL
ISQL> select c.customer_name, c.customer_city, o.order_id, o.order_value
from customers c, orders o
where o.customer_id = c.customer_id
order by c.customer_name;
CUSTOMER_NAME CUSTOMER_CITY
------------- -------------
ORDER_ID ORDER_VALUE
-------- -----------
Aerospace Enterprises Inc. Scottsdale
13 3000000
Aerospace Enterprises Inc. Scottsdale
14 1500000
Chemical Construction Inc. Joplin
11 3000000
Chemical Construction Inc. Joplin
12 7500000
Luxury Cars Inc. North Ridgeville
21 6000000
Luxury Cars Inc. North Ridgeville
20 5000000
Although this query retrieves the correct data, the formatting is inadequate:
• The display for each record wraps across two lines, primarily because of the column defini-
tions for the text columns customer_name and customer_city. ISQL displays the full col-
umn width (50 characters for each column) even though the contents don't use the entire
width.
• It's not clear that the values in the order_value column represent money amounts.
The next section shows how to use the COLUMN statement to address these formatting issues.
In addition, you can use DISPLAY, COMPUTE, and BREAK statements to present order sum-
maries for each customer. Section 3.4.2 "
Summarizing Data with DISPLAY, COMPUTE, and
BREAK Statements" on page 3-7 shows how to do this. Finally, you can add text that ISQL
displays at the beginning and end of query results with the TITLE statement, as described in
Section 3.4.3 "
Adding Beginning and Concluding Titles with the TITLE Statement" on page 3-
9.
All of these statements are independent of the actual query. You do not need to change the
query in any way to control how ISQL formats the results.