Re: Fixed length data types issue

On Thu, Sep 14, 2006 at 10:21:30PM +0100, Gregory Stark wrote:
> >> One very nifty trick would be to fix "char" to act as CHAR(), and map
> >> CHAR(1) automatically to "char".
> > Sorry, probably a stupid idea considering multi-byte encodings.  I
> > suppose it could be an optimization for single-byte encodings, but that
> > seems very limiting.
> No, there are lots of single-byte encoding databases. And one day we'll have
> per-column encoding anyways and there are lots of databases that have columns
> that want to be one-character ascii encoded fields.
> 
> It's limited but I wouldn't say it's very limiting. In the cases where it
> doesn't apply there's no way out anyways. A UTF8 field will need a length
> header in some form.

Declaring a column as ASCII should allow for char(8) to mean the same
as byte(8) with text semantics. byte(8) shouldn't require a length
header. :-)

Cheers,
mark

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