What are the CLIENT FILE driver restrictions in V16 and V17?

[Breck_Carter]

Do the same CLIENT FILE driver restrictions apply to both LOAD and UNLOAD in V16 and V17?

The following paragraph appears ONLY in the USING CLIENT FILE section of LOAD TABLE topic in the V17 Help Portal:

USING CLIENT FILE
...
Client-side data transfers are supported for clients that use the SQL Anywhere 
database drivers. They are not supported by the Tabular Data Stream (TDS) 
protocol used by SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise, the jConnect JDBC driver, 
or SAP Open Client applications.

It DOES NOT appear in these sections:

• INTO CLIENT FILE section UNLOAD topic in the V17 Help Portal
• USING CLIENT FILE section LOAD TABLE topic in the V16 DCX Help
• INTO CLIENT FILE section UNLOAD topic in the V16 DCX Help

---

Bonus Question: Where is "SAP SQL Anywhere 16.0" on the SAP Help Portal?

[Breck_Carter]

Why use SAP Help Portal?

It is much faster than DCX, and...

The Portal GUI doesn't suck as much as DCX is slow.

The Portal GUI sucks A LOT, but not nearly as much as the SAP Community GUI.

In fact, the Portal Search has a bit of a learning curve but it WORKS surprisingly well (fast and functional).

Yes, I am as shocked as your are, to hear myself say nice things about any SAP GUI 🙂

[VolkerBarth]

Well, I prefer the local help - it has still the fastest access:)

When choosing between DCX and the SAP Help Portal, I normally use the former, primarily because of the comments – unless when using a mobile device. For those, DCX is almost unusable IMHO.

[Breck_Carter]

> the local help - it has still the fastest access.

It's the ONLY thing I use for V12 and earlier.

For V16, I use all three depending on mood 🙂

For V17, just the portal... it may be the least likely to be out of date.

The Help Portal may also be the only remaining source for news about SQL Anywhere.

[VolkerBarth]

For V16, I use all three depending on mood 🙂

So there's v16 in the SAP Help Portal?

(Not that I would need that...)

[johnsmirnios · Accepted solution]

The TDS protocol itself does not support any client-side file access. Therefore the restriction applies to the 3 sections you listed.

[VolkerBarth · Accepted solution]

FWIW, the fact that this feature requires the CmdSeq protocol is also documented for v16 and v17 in the "Access to data on client computers" topic (although it doesn't really tell about TDS):

SQL Anywhere allows you to load data from, and unload data to, a file on a client computer using SQL statements and functions, without having to copy files to or from the database server computer. To do this, the database server initiates the transfer using a Command Sequence communication protocol (CmdSeq) file handler.