Rick Hillegas wrote: > I have trudged some way into this bug and would like to ask the > community's advice. > > If we adopt the SQL spec's rules for casting to/from BOOLEAN, then we > have to forbid the casting of BOOLEAN to integer types. Unfortunately, > we have system procedures which do just this. Some of our system > procedures cast the BOOLEAN columns in system tables to SMALLINT. In > particular, SYSIBM.SQLGETTYPEINFO performs this cast when asked to > retrieve ODBC type info. > Thanks Rick for thinking about backward compatibility.
For internal changes an adjustment like that seems ok but the *really* important thing is that we make sure that if metadata.properties is being changed that these calls still work on soft upgrade and particularly going back to an earlier version. I have always been an advocate of just dropping these all together when you go up or down in version, but got no traction with this idea when I mentioned it before. We have had some very unfortunate bugs in the past because of changes to the metadata file requiring time travel to fix. There may be an external impact to some users as well. It really bothers me to disable f functionality that users may be relying upon, but in this case I am really hoping it is not going to be a big problem, since that functionality looks pretty broken anyway and is not documented. You may wish to mention the change to derby-user and see if anyone has objections. It is important to document this risk in the release notes. I have on my list to start a Jira entry or Wiki to compile all of the changes that might affect existing users, but have not gotten to it yet. As for it being the tip of the iceburg, I don't know. Kathey
