Version and release changes in the ODBC driver behavior

The following list describes some of the important changes for V5R4:

The following list describes some of the important changes for V5R3:

There are several new features available when using the ODBC driver to access data on a V5R3 iSeries server. These features include:

• DB2^® UDB database types of BINARY and VARBINARY
• UTF-8 and UTF-16 data
• Increased precision of decimal numbers
• Support for accessing stored procedure result sets with scrollable cursors
• Enhanced commitment control model so that autocommit can run with any isolation level
• Enhanced Microsoft^® Transaction Server (MTS) / XA support which allows the coordination of transactions across multiple iSeries connections

The following list describes some of the important changes for V5R2:

There are several new features available when using the ODBC driver to access data on a V5R2 iSeries server. These features include:

• Ability to send Structured Query Language (SQL) statements that are 64K bytes long to the DB2 UDB database (the previous limit was 32K bytes)
• Ability to make use of the DB2 UDB database type of ROWID
• Ability to get back additional descriptor information, such as the base table name for a result set column
• Ability to access multiple databases on the same iSeries server
• Ability to retrieve meaningful information from the SQLTablePrivileges and SQLColumnPrivileges APIs
• Ability to use Kerberos support for authenticating a user to an iSeries server
• Ability to retrieve, regardless of the iSeries server version, more information in the result sets for the catalog APIs. The driver now queries the iSeries catalog tables directly to provide the result set for the catalog APIs.

The following list describes some of the important changes for V5R1:

• Character data for parameter markers is converted from the iSeries Access(PC) codepage directly to the column CCSID. If a new iSeries Access codepage setting was specified on the Advanced Translation Options dialog of the DSN setup GUI, it will be the iSeries Access(PC) codepage. The V4R5 driver first converted character data from the iSeries Access(PC) codepage to the job CCSID before it was converted to the column CCSID.
• Character column data is converted directly from the column CCSID to the iSeries Access(PC) codepage. If the C type specified is SQL_C_WCHAR, then the data is converted to Unicode.
• If the value type specified in SQLBindParameter is SQL_C_WCHAR, then the driver converts the parameter marker data from Unicode to the column CCSID.
• When calling SQLBindParameter for a SQL_C_CHAR to INTEGER conversion, if BufferLength is 0 and the buffer contains an empty string then an error is returned. The V4R5 driver would accept the empty string and insert the value of 0 into the table.
• The lazy close option default is 0 (OFF), and in V4R5 its default was 1 (ON).
• The prefetch option default is 0 (OFF), and in V4R5 its default was 1 (ON).
• Unicode SQL statements can be sent to V5R1 or later iSeries servers. The package names are generated differently than in V4R5 when sending Unicode SQL statements.
• Managed DSNs (created through V4R5 or earlier iSeries Navigator) are not supported. They are instead treated like a User DSN, meaning that the DSN information is not updated from the server copy.
• BIGINT data type is supported to V4R5 (or later) hosts.
• Static cursor supported to V5R1 or later hosts. In earlier hosts, and in previous iSeries Access for Windows^® ODBC drivers, static cursor type is mapped to dynamic.
• The V5R1 driver supports the ODBC 3.51 specification. In V4R5, the ODBC 2.5 specification was supported.
• In V5R1, no conversion is performed when fetching data from a char field and retrieving it as SQL_C_BINARY. In V4R5, the driver translated data from EBCDIC codepages to ASCII codepages.