Make REVOKE statement description mention what happens for open result sets/cursors

• Key: DERBY-4164
• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Resolution: Fixed
• Priority: Minor
• Assignee: Dag H. Wanvik
• Reporter: Dag H. Wanvik
• Component/s: Documentation
• Affects Version/s: 10.2.2.1, 10.2.3.0, 10.3.3.1, 10.3.4.0, 10.4.2.1, 10.4.3.0, 10.5.1.1
• Fix Version/s: 10.5.2.0, 10.6.0.0

Description

When a REVOKE statement is executed, already open result sets are not impacted. This should be mentioned
in the user documentation, at least here: ref/rrefsqljrevoke.html.

Permissions are checked at statement execute time; if this succeeds, a cursor/result set will be able to access all rows
in the result set even if privileges/roles are revoked after the execute but before the result set/cursor is closed.

Comments

[Dag H. Wanvik]

Uploading a patch adding a subsection explaining this to the reference manual's REVOKE
section.

[Kim Haase]

Dag, this is a great explanation, but there is a bit of a run-on sentence in it. I'm attaching a second patch (derby-4164-2.diff) that makes a few edits -- I hope it has not changed the meaning of anything. I've also attached the output HTML page, rrefsqljrevoke.html.

[Dag H. Wanvik]

Thanks for looking at this Kim!
I agree, the wording I used for "execute" was awkward; I was trying to refer to the JDBC "execute" method in order to use a more specific term than "execution", which could possibly be construed as also referring the fetching of rows from the result set/cursor, but thinking about it again, "execution" is better. Your other edits also improve readability.

I upload a third version (with HTML for convenience), in which I make the sentence about the
result set start a new paragraph, to avoid giving the impression that this description only
applies when prepared statements are used; it also holds when direct execution is used, of course.
Do you think I would be better to use a separate section to further clarify this?

[Kim Haase]

I don't think you need a separate section, since the title covers open result sets in general -- but it might be helpful to change the sentence to say something like

  Once a result set has been returned to the application (by a prepared statement or by direct execution), ...

Though I'm not exactly sure what "direct execution" covers -- execution of an ordinary Statement rather than a prepared one?

[Dag H. Wanvik]

Yes, that's the common usage of "direct execution", cf. e.g. here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa197638(SQL.80).aspx

[Dag H. Wanvik]

Uploading patch #4 with your suggested wording, Kim, thanks.
Committed as svn 766177.

[Dag H. Wanvik]

Backported to 10.5 docs branch as:
svn merge -c 766177 https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/db/derby/docs/trunk
Committed as svn 766179, closing.