Doug Chamberlin wrote:

> Do we really want to introduce this change? I see the blob-to-string
> and string-to-blob stuff as a mildly interesting capability with no
> real need addressed except a vague sense of symmetry.

I have seen the question raised many many times on the newsgroups
over the years: "how do I INSERT a literal value to a Blob?"
The answer is that you can't put a quoted string into an INSERT
statement to load a value into a Blob. Programmatically, it must
be done segment-by-segment with the Blob functions in the InterBase
API. Some interfaces, like Delphi's data controls and IBPerl
provide more convenient ways of doing this, but internally to
those interfaces it necessarily uses the Blob functions.

The other thing this would buy us is the ability to write,
SELECT * FROM MYTABLE
WHERE ABlobField =
"Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their
country";

Allowing string literals to be used for assignment or comparison with
text Blobs would be convenient.

I would be satisfied with Markus' suggestion for CAST() operations
to convert text Blobs to VARCHAR and back.

Bill Karwin