rp_sqlredirect: Things to keep in mind

• You are not limited by any means to SQL in the form of ``select *''. You can receive any result you would normally receive as if you were logged in to the ACS dataserver directly. A select statement such as select student_id, stu_crs, ssn from stu_table where stu_crs like 'CRS1%'.

• @srcserver and @dstserver must be known to Open Server. This shouldn't be a problem with @srcserver since that will usually be an ACS dataserver, but you may need to get ACS to register @dstserver in our interfaces file.

• Open Server for Unix currently does not have support for text and image datatypes.

• The destination database must have select into/bulkcopy set to TRUE. In other words, you must normally be able to bulkcopy into the destination database.

• Unnamed result columns such as the result from ``select count(*) from foobar'' will be assigned neat names like unnamed00. If this is a problem, assign the result column a name in your SQL query.

• Result column names may not have spaces such as ``Number of foobars''. Change this to something like ``Number_of_foobars'' if it is a problem.

• The destination table will allow NULL's in all columns. This does not necessarily mean NULL's will exist in your result data.

• In order to make the remote procedure call from a non-ACS dataserver, the Open Server must be added to the appropriate interfaces file and also added to the server list with sp_addserver. For users wishing to add the openserver to their interfaces file, the openserver lives on hostname: openserver.acs.ncsu.edu at port number 3035.