I know this has been discussed before, but there hasn't been a consus if those limitations should be extended...
I don't believe we had consensus one way or the other.
IMHO, Derby should not be constrained by the capabilities of other products. We need to weigh this based on the problems for users in converting any on-disk image to support larger identifiers vs. the flexibility in using longer identifiers.
There is no consistency amongst "enterprise" vendors on a limit, with neither Oracle or DB2 supporting the specification's limit of 128 characters across the board.
The ability to support more identifiers (and hence applications) than we can at the moment can only be good for Derby. It will be easier for users to port applications from other databases (Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, Cloudscape 9 :-), ...) as well as DB2. For users considering future upgrades to other servers this is a relatively minor issue to consider (compared to SQL syntax portability, procedure language, identity column issues, ...)
On the implementation front, this can be handled as a 'slushy' upgrade, with the 10.0 branch supporting the crippled version and others supporting longer identifiers unless constrained to 10.0 compatibility.
In conclusion, unless there is a good technical reason to stick with the current limits, I think we should increase them to 128 across the board.
-- Jeremy
