Re: JDBC4 Spec exegesis needed, was: [jira] Commented: (DERBY-925) Implement new JDBC 4 metadata API getFunctionParameters()

[Lance J. Andersen]

Daniel John Debrunner wrote: Rick Hillegas wrote: Hi Lance, Is it OK for a JDBC3 implementation to return more information than the spec demands? In particular, consider the various result sets returned by DatabaseMetaData calls. Is it OK for these result sets to contain additional, trailing columns, above and beyond the columns required by the JDBC3 spec? To be even more pedantic, can JDBC3 implementations return the fatter JDBC4 result sets? JDBC tutorial & reference, version 2.0, sdection 15.2.2, page 369 says: "A DBMS may define additional columns for a ResultSet object that is returned by a DatabaseMetaData method". Not officially part of the spec, but I've always assumed the tutorial books are a good guideline of the spec, given the authors. While it is a good guideline, it in fact has differed at times resulting in driver implementation differences. The methods in DatabaseMetaData which allow additional columns is documented in the javadocs.    However, it would not have been wise as a programmer to use anything but the column name when accessing non-standard columns. -lance Dan.