IgnoreBuffer to skip values

You can use the IgnoreBuffer structure in your user-defined functions to skip or avoid processing arguments that you do not require in your data type conversions. For example, you might want to convert a timestamp to hours, minutes, and seconds, but if you do not need the microseconds component, you can ignore it.

IgnoreBuffer has the following syntax:

union IgnoreBuffer
{
     uint8 u8;
     uint16 u16;
     uint32 u32;
     uint64 u64;
     int8 s8;
     int16 s16;
     int32 s32;
     int64 s64;
}

To decode a Netezza Performance Server time to h:m:s only, and ignore microseconds, you can use the IgnoreBuffer structure as follows:

uint8 h,m,s;
IgnoreBuffer ignore;
decodeTime(givenTime, &h, &m, &s, &ignore.u32);

In another example, to decode a date value into only the day and month and ignore the year, you can use IgnoreBuffer as follows:

uint8 month,day;
IgnoreBuffer ignore;
decodeDate(givenDate, &month, &day, &ignore.u16);

Be aware that the buffer does not contain any meaningful data at any time.