You can create a procedure that contains a URL. Calling the procedure returns a result set that contains the information returned from the web service. Here's an example:

create procedure consume_service() url 'http://example.com/service' type 'http:get';
select * from consume_service() with (attribute long varchar, value long varchar);

The result set contains:

• a row with Attribute='Status'; value contains the HTTP status (eg. HTTP/1.1 200 OK)
• a row with Attribute='Body'; value contains the body of the response
• one row for each HTTP header sent by the HTTP server where Attribute=the header type and Value=the value of the header

There are options for using HTTPS instead of HTTP, using a proxy server, using SOAP, providing parameters, etc. The v17 documentation for this version of the CREATE PROCEDURE statement is here.

Assuming by external you mean external to the database server, then, the SQL Anywhere database server can consume web content and services.

With SQL Anywhere you can create "Web Service" procedures and functions that can request content from an external webservice that you have rights/permissons to. This can be either an HTTP or SOAP request. The take on a variation of the {CREATE|ALTER} {FUNCTION|PROCEDURE} statements which show up in the index as "CREATE .... [Web service]" entries.

After the request is satisfied you can also access that information using many XML- (OpenXML), HTTP-, and HTML-aware functions as we as the stable of normal functions available in the database to parse and extract the specific informaion you want.

You will have to check for this on DCX a little later (currently, and temporarily, unavailable). Alternatively you can always just install the documentation locally and refer to that as well.

The above is the most direct way of doing that. You may also want to familiarize yourself with our "external enviroments" (PHP, PERL, JAVA, CLR, ...) which might open up other approaches or allow for more involved web requests or non-standard content.

HTH