"Fred Williams" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Ah the sticky wicket that is "Type less" :-) We now have issues > evolving as a direct result of that feature in our cute little database. > We now seem to have by backing into it: Really Restricted Integer, Real, > DateTime (sort of), and Text. BLOB and CLOB away at your own risk! > > Is it time to officially declare/fully support some Types and clear the > air? >
SQLite is not "type-less". It uses manifest or dynamic typing instead of static-typing which is what most other SQL database engines use (and the SQL standard specifies). Manifest or dynamic typing is a superset of static typing. The use of static typing in the SQL standard is a bug in that standard, in my view, than unnecessarily complicates and restricts what you can do with SQL. The original SQL standard specifies static typing so that implementations can use fixed-size records. Static typing is an artifact of the implementation showing through into the interface. Static typing in SQL is designed not to help the users of SQL databases, but rather to help the implementors of SQL database engines. SQLite is the only SQL database engine that I am aware of that offers dynamic typing. This is not going to change. The difficult faced by SQLite is not how to deal with a dynamically typed language (that's easy) but how to deal with a dynamic typing in a way that is backwards compatible with the (broken) static typing behavior of SQL. That is much harder. But it is achievable, I think. -- D. Richard Hipp <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
