Just to revert a moment (and maybe clear this out of my doubt inventory)...

A few days ago, Jim was "polling" to get some kind of a numbers count on
the dependency of current application code on blob segments...it didn't
bring forth many responses but I don't think that should be construed as
"nobody's code cares about blob segments".

Given that all applications written for Delphi using the BDE and the native
IB driver (or various ODBC drivers) process blobs into a text stream, can
we verify that these interfaces would just as happily work in the absence
of segments? I don't know what these drivers do with IB blobs. It may
well be that they don't consider segments at all when reading and writing
them. Indications (strong) are that Borland is not going to produce any
more upgrades to the BDE. What is known about the drivers?

The second area is apps written in C/C++ that handle blob segments in
embedded procedures. Wouldn't we be looking at a far-reaching problem
there for upgrading to beyond-6 releases? The Replication Engine? IBX?

I'm not arguing against the idea of producing a fully taxonomised system of
blob filters - I think it would be a mighty feature asset for InterBase! -
but I do have this concern about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Helen
http://www.interbase2000.org
___________________________________________________
"Ask not what your free, open-source database can do for you,
but what you can do for your free, open-source database."
(J.F.K.)