Two DB questions

[Len Morgan]

Klaus,

It seems that you come from an "old fashioned" DB background (i.e., 
dBaseII, etc) where the idea of a record number meant something.  If you 
read up on the history of SQL, you'll see that one of reasons for SQL 
was to get rid of the concept of a record number.  In fact when you join 
two or more tables, what would the "record number" represent since the 
"table" that you are returning doesn't actually exist in the database 
(it's created on the fly). 

However, there IS a way that Revolution is particularly good at:  Return 
your records as a list (as opposed to a record set) and then go to the 
line number (which becomes the record number) and use "items" to get at 
the various fields.  As long as your returned data isn't too large, it 
should be very fast.

As to your second question (how do you know if a table has any data in 
it), I've always used SQL to give me that answer:

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM mytable

Any SQL database worthy of the name should have at least this aggregate 
function.  PostgreSQL at least, doesn't require the "GROUP BY" clause 
with COUNT(*) and I suspect others would be the same.  If the record 
count is 0, there hasn't been any data entered.  It won't choke if there 
are no tables since in this case, zero is a valid answer.

len morgan