Hi Luis,

> Does anybody know of any limitations in terms of varchar and blob lengths
> in IB through the BDE?

VARCHARS - no limitation which I know of. There is a limitation if you need
to index the varchar column. Depending on character set, you won't be able
to
create index on that column.

The error message looks like:

unsuccessful metadata update
-key size too big for index RDB$2
Statement failed, SQLCODE = -607

:-)

I believe that there is an exact rule for this, but from my experience, I
don't
use varchars longer than about 80 characters for indexed columns.

BLOBs - no limitation, AFAIK. I have two apps both using BDE - one stores
text in blobs - knowledgebase articles. There are articles (in blob fields)
longer than 20 kB. The second app stores videosequences in blobs - there are
hundreds of videosequences, some of them longer than 8 Megabytes and
everything seems to be OK.

Both apps use BDE 5.1.1.1. The apps are written in Delphi, run on W2K SP2
(I originally run them on NT 4.0 - the OS version does not seem to be an
issue
here).

> It seems that we are hitting a ceiling at 4096 characters into a
> blob field (subtype 1) through the BDE.

It seems that the problem is somewhere else. Could you be more specific
on your environment / application? I have never had problems with large
BLOBs via BDE.

> How do we fix this and not having to port to non-BDE?

What version of BDE you use? I heard many times that the versions
shipped with D6 are buggy. Downgrading may be of some help :-)

> What about varchars? We are hiitnig the ceiling at 255 chars...

See the above.

FWIW,

Rado