At 01:27 PM 5/6/00 +1000, Helen Borrie wrote:

>
>Eew, I just hate this idea.
>
>One of the blessings of blobs is that, to the database, it's just a mess of
>bytes. I can push anything into a blob - a WP file, an image file, even a
>whole database - and the engine will store it and retrieve it without
>caring what's in it.
>
>The mind boggles to think what one would have to do with even a simple (but
>perhaps large) text file if it had to be a string. It would have to be
>parsed before you could even submit it to the database because it would be
>guaranteed to contain reserved symbols. The apostrophe (single-quote)
>comes to mind as a real showstopper.
>
>
>I hope nobody really seriously thinks we should deprecate blobs.
>

Perish the thought. Madam, I am the inventor of both the blob and
the name. I would never consider deprecating the little creatures.
All I was suggesting is that a character blob can be treated in
the DML as a character string -- a long one, perhaps, but a character
string. Comparisons, assignments to/from strings, arguments to
UDFs are all very well defined. I was merely suggesting that
restrictions be lifted. No more.

The problem, however, is that the internal descriptor currently
has a 16 length field. Changed that to 32 bits would require
recompilation of the entire engine! (Also find the thousand
places that the length is assigned to a short).

But no indexes on blobs, please.

Jim Starkey