David,

> Anyone that thinks they need a 16K character column is
> smoking something which the State of California says
> is OK for medical purposes, but the federal
> government disagrees.
>
> Such a beast belongs in a blob - and use of blobs
> in expressions (where upper(blob) like '%FOO%')
> should have better support.
>
> Seriously, who needs a row of data that large?

If you put data in the row, you need three requests more to fetch that
data from the database (isc_open_blob, isc_get_segment,
isc_close_blob). If you store binary data that are always smaller than
32k, it makes sense to put them into varchar and not into the blob and
access will be faster.

I will agree with you that conceptually this is wrong, but wire
protocol changes are planned for 2.0, and this unicode stuff might
belong to 1.6 already.

Roman