At 04:35 PM 12/26/2001 +0000, csswa wrote:

>Apologies if this is in the wrong area. It's my first post and I'm
>still figuring out what goes where.

This is probably OK, since it's not a support question (IB-Support).

>I see IB6.5 no longer sends varchar fields across a network as padded
>strings but rather their true length. This removes a long-standing
>drawback of using large-size varchars that contain wide-ranging value
>lengths. Firstly, what is the purpose of the padding in the original
>IB design?

The original assumption was that transport layers would quickly
adopt compression and that the compression done by that layer
would be better suited to the algorithms it used than anything
that we could do. We also assumed that large variable length
things would be stored as blobs which don't have this problem.

Within the engine, all records and messages are passed in their
full length for simplicity and speed, so it's less a question of
padding than of not stripping the irrelevant bytes.

> Secondly, will this improvement be included in a future
>release of Firebird?

I would expect so.



Regards,

Ann
www.ibphoenix.com
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