A system-descriptor area

A system-descriptor area is an area of memory declared by IBM® Informix® ESQL/C to hold data either returned from or sent by a prepared statement. It is the dynamic-management structure that conforms to the X/Open standards.

A system-descriptor area has two parts:
  • A fixed-size portion is made up of the COUNT field. This field contains the number of columns described in the system-descriptor area.
  • A variable-length portion contains an item descriptor for each value in the system-descriptor area. Each item descriptor is a fixed-size structure.
The following figure shows what a system-descriptor area looks like for two values.
Figure 1. Schematic that shows system-descriptor area for two values