Declaring prepared statements

Optimize prepared cursor statements by using the FROM clause of DECLARE CURSOR.

Line 2 of this example shows a cursor declared with a prepared statement:

PREPARE s FROM "SELECT * FROM table WHERE ", condition
DECLARE c CURSOR FOR s

While this has no performance impact with IBM® Informix® database drivers, it can become a bottleneck when using non-IBM Informix database servers:

Statement preparation consumes a lot of memory and processor resources. Declaring a cursor with a prepared statement is a native IBM Informix feature, which consumes only one real statement preparation. Non-IBM Informix database servers do not support this feature, so the statement is prepared twice (once for the PREPARE, and once for the DECLARE). When used in a big loop, this code can cause performance problems.

To optimize the code, use the FROM clause in the DECLARE statement:

DECLARE c CURSOR FROM "SELECT * FROM table WHERE " || condition

By using this solution only one statement preparation will be done by the database server.

This performance problem does not occur with DECLARE statements using static SQL.