On Thu, Jun 12, 2003 at 05:17:17PM +1000, Mike Battersby wrote:
> 
> 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.

And if you have table full of multi-gigabyte video clips?

> Maybe there needs to be a sentinel value (-1?) for LongReadLen to indicate
> fetching everything?

That's a good point. But ultimately you're still limited by what
will fit in your process memory.

Note that the DBI spec does not mandate a default value.
You're quite free to set it to the maximum value it'll hold.

Tim.

> 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
> 
> 

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