Fixed-length portion

The fixed-size portion of the system-descriptor area consists of the single field, which following table shows.
Table 1. Field in the fixed-size portion of a system-descriptor area
Field Data type Description
COUNT short The number of column values or occurrences in the system-descriptor area. This is the number of item descriptors, one for each column. The DESCRIBE...USING SQL DESCRIPTOR statement sets COUNT to the number of described columns. You must use SET DESCRIPTOR to initialize the field before you send column values to the database server.