I don't really know enough to understand what you mean. At what point
does the blob become a varchar? All I want is for the blob to be
returned along with the other fields as well as my summation as a
separate, new field. Is there something about this query that
inherently forces the blob to become a varchar?

Thanks for your help.

-Matt

--- In firebird-support@yahoogroups.com, Jason Dodson <jasond@b...> wrote:
>
> Being that they are blobs, is there a chance their length is greater
then that
> which can be represented by a VarChar type?
>
> Jason
>
> perlmunger wrote:
> > Seems like there is probably a simple answer to this, but I'm a bit
> > new to Firebird to know what I'm missing. My query is attempting to
> > get a sum of values from another table to include along with several
> > columns in the main table. The problem is that when I have any columns
> > in the main table that are BLOB types, I get the following error:
> >
> > "error: conversion error from string 'BLOB'"
> >
> >
> > Whenever I remove the BLOB columns from the query, it works fine. Here
> > is the query (MEDICAL.SHIPTO_COMMENT is the BLOB):
> >
> > SELECT MEDICAL.ORDER_NO,
> > MEDICAL.CUSTOMER_ID,
> > MEDICAL.PHYSICIAN_ID,
> > MEDICAL.SALESPERSON_ID,
> > MEDICAL.REFERRAL_ID,
> > MEDICAL.SHIPTO_COMMENT,
> > SUM( MEDICAL_ITEM.QTY_ORDERED * MEDICAL_ITEM.PRICE ) AS ORDER_TOTAL
> > FROM MEDICAL
> > INNER JOIN MEDICAL_ITEM ON MEDICAL.ORDER_NO =
MEDICAL_ITEM.ORDER_NO
> > WHERE MEDICAL.DELIVERY_ACTUAL IS NULL
> > GROUP BY MEDICAL.ORDER_NO,
> > MEDICAL.CUSTOMER_ID,
> > MEDICAL.PHYSICIAN_ID,
> > MEDICAL.SALESPERSON_ID,
> > MEDICAL.REFERRAL_ID,
> > MEDICAL.SHIPTO_COMMENT
> > ORDER BY MEDICAL.ORDER_NO
> >
> > Thanks for your help.
> >
> > -Matt
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
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