David W. Van Couvering wrote:
One could argue that adding TINYINT support makes it harder to migrate
applications from Derby *to* Oracle and DB2. But it seems to me this
is easily mitigated by clearly documenting that this type is not
supported by databases X,Y,Z and thus should be avoided if your plan
is to migrate to that database in the future.
You could argue that but...
The concern IMHO is migrating apps to Derby not away from Derby. We
need to make it easier for people to adopt. You could always add a
level of verbosity via a flag which generates warnings when
non-compliant syntax is used in addition to adding a means to flag SQL
compliance to the docs for various syntax and datatypes. SQL Anywhere
does a pretty good job of that. Oracle I believe has a chart in their
docs which compares their datatypes and SQL standard datatypes along
with a guide as to what they should map to
I would rather document SQL compliance (for more than just datatypes)
than not support the datatype.
Besides the more vendors that support it, the sooner will be considered
for adoption by the standards committee
David
Lance J. Andersen wrote:
I am for adding this datatype back. While it may not be part of the
SQL Standard, it is a common datatype supported by multiple vendors.
Having this datatype supported helps with the migration of
applications and at the end of the day making it easier for
applications to migrate is more important than basing a decision
soley on whether the datatype is supported by the SQL standards.
+1 (unofficial vote) for this addition
Rick Hillegas (JIRA) wrote:
Re-enable the TINYINT datatype
------------------------------
Key: DERBY-695
URL: http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/DERBY-695
Project: Derby
Type: New Feature
Reporter: Rick Hillegas
I would like to collect here the arguments for and against
re-enabling the TINYINT datatype. Once this discussion calms down,
we can schedule a vote on the issue.
Background: Cloudscape used to support the TINYINT datatype, which
was an 8 bit int. This datatype was hidden from customers as part of
an effort to remove all datatypes not supported by DB2. Re-enabling
the datatype would not require a lot of effort. Some arguments for
and against re-enabling this datatype can be found on the November
2005 email thread titled "New features for next release .... (Was:
Grant and Revoke ... DERBY-464...)".
Here are the arguments in favor so far:
+ This datatype is defined by one of our key standards, JDBC. It is
in JDBC 2, 3, and 4, all of the JDBC revs supported by Derby 10.2.
+ This datatype is supported by some important databases, including
MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and Sybase.
Here are the arguments against so far:
- This datatype is not defined by our other key standard, ANSI SQL.
Here our two main standards diverge.
- This datatype is not supported by some important databases,
including Oracle, DB2, and (some) Informix databases.
Against this proposal, it was also argued that there was some sort
of friction with ODBC. I do not understand this argument:
SQL_TINYINT is an ODBC datatype. See
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/odbc/htm/odbcsql_data_types.asp.
A friction with .NET was also suggested but I don't understand this
either. "byte" and "Sbyte" are the .NET 8-bit integer types. See
http://www.codersource.net/csharp_tutorial_data_types.html.
A friction with Perl was also suggested but I don't understand this
either.
