Hi Robert,

> >> one compelling reason would be that they travel in full-length
> between
> >> server and client. :-(
>
> That's compelling enough for me. Do you know why that is? If I have a
> type that may vary in length from say 100 characters to 10k characters,
> it has to send a 10k buffer across? I don't get it. Is this the case
> even with Firebird?
>
> We want to store registry paths, which can be arbitrarily long.
> Unfortunately, you can't index on a blob so a lookup on a path could
> take a long time.

You can't index a 10K varchar-column either.

> I think what we will do is create a size limitted varchar for user
> collation, indexing, searching, and displaying. The raw complete name as
> a BLOB, and a hash of the complete string for lookup by the underlying
> implementation (which needs to find a row using the entire,
> non-truncated path). Hmmm....any other suggestions?

With regards,

Martijn Tonies
Database Workbench - the developer tool for InterBase & Firebird
Upscene Productions
http://www.upscene.com

"This is an object-oriented system.
If we change anything, the users object."