At moment we are working on AnyDAC v 2.0.13, which will be released at end of August, 2009. Here I will shed the light on the new things. No need to say, that many issues will be resolved and many minor things will be added or improved.

Time interval data type support

In two words time interval data type allows to handle a high precision value of the two dates / timestamps difference. The following is the list of the DBMSs, supporting time intervals, with the links to the discussions of how do they support intervals:

• Oracle
• Informix
• PostgreSQL

AnyDAC v 2.0.13 will introduce internal dtTimeIntervalXXX data types, which will be mapped to ftOraInterval DB.pas data type. The time interval data type support includes:

• result set columns;
• parameters;
• custom variants;
• streaming.

XML data type support

I hope, I does not need to explain what is a XML and how DB's are handling it .

AnyDAC v 2.0.13 will introduce internal dtXML data types, which will be mapped to ftDBaseOle DB.pas data type (sorry, we cannot extend TFieldType). The XML data type support includes:

• result set columns;
• parameters.

Firebird 2.5 new features

We have added support for following new Firebird 2.5 features:

• UTF8 database file name. AnyDAC will automatically send a database file name in UTF8, if an application is connected to DB 2.5 or higher.
• SQL-2003 standard SQLState error info. An application can check SQLState using code like that:  

try
  ......
except
  on E:  EIBNativeException do
    if TADIBError(E[0]).SQLState = '...' then
      DoSomething;
end;

• Canceling a SQL query. An application can abort long running queries using AbortJob method.
• SOME_COL = ? OR ? IS NULL Predication. The link explains everything.
• New SQL keywords were added.

Also the AnyDAC IB/FB driver was fully tested with Firebird 2.5.0.23247.

{LIMIT([<skip>,] <rows>)

Some of you know, that a SQL syntax allowing to skip some records from result set and limit a total number of rows selected rows is very different from a DBMS to a DBMS. And may have limitations, for example, do not support the skiping of records (eg, MS SQL Server).

So, we have introduced new escape sequence - LIMIT, which allows to write DBMS-independent SELECT commands, skiping some records and/or limiting a total number of rows. The syntax is in the chapter title. Example:

SELECT {LIMIT(10, 5)} * FROM {id ORDER Details}

The command above will skip first 10 records and will return next 5 records.