Dear DBI developers, I've been doing some more work on the long data type support in DBD::Ingres (which unfortunately still hasn't managed to make it into the official distribution), and now have support for the Ingres byte and long byte binary data types as well.
I have a question about long data types though, which hasn't been resolved by checking other DBD drivers, as they all seem to do things differently. Is it preferable to support LongReadLen and LongTruncOk, or just to return the entire field? To be honest, in my own work I never have a need for limiting the length, and it seems ludicrous to make the user guess what the largest size data is if you can just return the whole lot anyway by allocating memory dynamically. Maybe there needs to be a sentinel value (-1?) for LongReadLen to indicate fetching everything? At the moment I have two versions of DBD::Ingres in development, one which supports the Long* settings exactly as per the DBI pod, and one which ignores them entirely and always returns the complete data. Any hints about the correct way to deal with long values would be appreciated. I consider it essential to allow the programmer to fetch all the data without having to guess at the size. Henrik: if you read this and you ever get time to look at my long data type stuff, drop me a line first so I can zap you the most recent version. Cheers, - Mike Battersby -- Mike Battersby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> The University of Melbourne Fetch my pgp key from: http://ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au/~mib/pgpkey.txt
