The STARTING WITH conditional expression tests for the presence of a specified string at the beginning of a string expression. A STARTING WITH conditional expression is true if the second string expression begins with the characters specified in the first string expression. If you precede the STARTING WITH expression by the optional NOT qualifier, the condition is true if the first value expression does not begin with the characters specified by the second value expression. The STARTING WITH conditional expression is case-sensitive; it considers uppercase and lowercase forms of the same character to be different.
1 – Examples
The following programs demonstrate the use of the STARTING WITH clause. These programs create a record stream containing the records in the EMPLOYEES relation in which the field LAST_NAME has a name that begins with the string "IACO" or "Iaco". These programs print the employee ID and last name contained in each record in the record stream.
1.1 – C Example
#include <stdio.h> DATABASE PERS = FILENAME "PERSONNEL"; main() { READY PERS; START_TRANSACTION READ_ONLY; FOR E IN EMPLOYEES CROSS D1 IN DEGREES OVER EMPLOYEE_ID WITH (UNIQUE D2 IN DEGREES WITH D2.EMPLOYEE_ID = E.EMPLOYEE_ID) AND D1.DEGREE_FIELD = "Arts" AND D1.COLLEGE_CODE = "STAN" printf ("%s\n", E.EMPLOYEE_ID); END_FOR; COMMIT; FINISH; }
1.2 – Pascal Example
program multiple_cond (input,output); DATABASE PERS = FILENAME 'PERSONNEL'; begin READY PERS; START_TRANSACTION READ_ONLY; FOR E IN EMPLOYEES CROSS D1 IN DEGREES OVER EMPLOYEE_ID WITH (UNIQUE D2 IN DEGREES WITH D2.EMPLOYEE_ID = E.EMPLOYEE_ID) AND D1.DEGREE_FIELD = 'Arts' AND D1.COLLEGE_CODE = 'STAN' writeln (E.EMPLOYEE_ID); END_FOR; COMMIT; FINISH; end.
2 – Format
(B)0[mstarting-with-clause = qqq> value-expr qqwqq>qqqqqqqqwqq> [4mSTARTING[m [4mWITH[m qqq> value-expr qq> mqq> [4mNOT[m qqqj
2.1 – Format arguments
value-expr A value expression. A symbol or a string of symbols used to calculate a value. When you use a value expression in a statement, Oracle Rdb calculates the value associated with the expression and uses that value when executing the statement.