David W. Van Couvering wrote: > As I understand it the value of TINYINT is: > > - Enables of migration of applications to Derby > - Allows for better use of storage (which goes in line with our "small > footprint" goal) > > The reason against it is it is a non-standard SQL type. But don't we > already have things in Derby that are not part of the SQL standard?
I think people are just pointing out all aspects and implications of adding such a type. Adding something that is not in the standard is something that should be considered carefully, and considered on a per-case basis. SYNONYM is an example of something that was added to Derby that is not in the SQL standard, but in that case there is a clearer de-facto standard, it's supported by most databases and it provides some new useful functionality. TINYINT (in my mind) is more borderline, it's not supported by a lot of databases, and not by the databases that hold #1 and #2 in marketshare. Thus I see all the points of view being very useful to leading to a decision. As an example, I think Rick was originally proposing TINYINT as Cloudscape used to support it. That might have seemed reasonable but the discussion has thrown up that such an implementation would not make sense. Derby would have a TINYINT that was incompatble with the two of the three databases that support it, while saying TINYINT is being added to be compatible with those databases. The the mismatch with JDBC is interesting (short vs. byte) and useful information that would need to be documented. Dan.
