What's New in SQL Anywhere Studio
  What's New in Version 8.0.0
    New features in version 8
      Adaptive Server Anywhere new features

SQL features

• Full outer joins    Full outer joins are now supported. In addition, the keyword OUTER is now optional for right, left, and full outer joins.

  For more information, see Outer joins.

• CASE statements    The ANSI standard allows two forms of CASE statements. Adaptive Server Anywhere 8.0 supports both syntaxes.

  For more information, see CASE statement.

• WAITFOR statement    This statement delays processing for the current connection for a specified amount of time or until a given time.

  For more information, see WAITFOR statement.

• RAISERROR statement allows connections to be disallowed    This statement can now be used to disallow or limit connections.

  For more information, see RAISERROR statement [T-SQL].

• Timezone adjustment    To permit easier coordination of date/time values across time zones, the following new features have been added:

  • CURRENT UTC TIMESTAMP    Adjusts the time zone value by the server's time zone adjustment value.

  • DEFAULT UTC TIMESTAMP    Specifies a default value for INSERTs and sets updated columns to the value.

  • TimeZoneAdjustment property    returns the number of minutes that must be added to the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to display the new local time.

  • TIME_ZONE_ADJUSTMENT option    Allows a connection's time zone adjustment to be modified.

• New collation functions    The SORTKEY function generates values that can be used to sort character data. SORTKEY allows you to perform sorting beyond the default behavior of Adaptive Server Anywhere collation.

  The COMPARE function allows you to directly compare two character strings based on alternate collation rules.

  For more information, see SORTKEY function [String] and COMPARE function [String].

• ERRORMSG function    The new SQL function ERRORMSG can be used to obtain error messages.

  For more information, see ERRORMSG function [Miscellaneous].

• Data type conversion functions    The ISDATE and ISNUMERIC functions test if a string can be converted to a date or number, respectively.

  For more information, see ISDATE function [Data type conversion], and ISNUMERIC function [Miscellaneous]