I'd suggest a CHAR/VARCHAR field defined with character set OCTETS. I'm
not sure about Ole, but when using JDBC this will forego any UTF-X
conversions and works well for things like GUIDs or MD5s.

-----Original Message-----
From: Steve_Miller@... [mailto:Steve_Miller@...]
Sent: Friday, December 12, 2003 8:01 AM
To: firebird-support@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [firebird-support] Newbie Question: A GUID data type


We are trying to port a database from SQL Server to Firebird. The
database
makes considerable use of GUIDs, but Firebird doesn't have a GUID data
type, as far as I know. Here is a snippet of the message my colleague
sent
describing some of the problems we're running into:

The OleDbCommand method GetColValue needs to return the column data in a

format acceptable to the application. If we store GUIDs in CHAR columns,

and CHAR columns are also used for text data, then it will be difficult

for GetColValue to know whether to convert the column value to UTF-16
(as
required for text), or to simply copy the data unchanged into the client

application's buffer (as required for GUIDs).

GetColValue does not allow the application to specify the type of the
returned value. All we have to go on, is the server datatype. If that is

the same for what should really be two distinct types (text and GUID),
then we run into difficulties.

Steve Miller
Language Software Development
SIL International


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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