Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!ginosko!uunet!dgis!daitc!jkrueger From: jkrueger@daitc.daitc.mil (Jon Krueger) Newsgroups: comp.databases Subject: Re: LONG data type in Oracle Keywords: LONG, data types, Oracle Message-ID: <640@daitc.daitc.mil> Date: 27 Sep 89 13:11:52 GMT References: <203@fjcp60.GOV> Organization: DTIC Special Projects Office (DTIC-SPO), Alexandria VA Lines: 24 brinkema@fjcnet.GOV (John R. Brinkema) writes: >Oracle has two data types LONG and LONG RAW, which are designed to hold very >long byte strings (up to 64K; interpreted and uninterpreted, respectively). >These data types are not in standard SQL. Are they (or the equivalent to store >clots of strange bytes) available in any other relational/SQL database systems >(eg. Sybase, Ingres, etc)? All commercial DBMS have similar types now or will have them in the near future. >Long byte strings are *very* useful for misc. text and wierd things (relative >to SQL anyway) like binary picture. Long byte strings are second class citizens in Oracle. You cannot select, join, pattern match, or index on them, or substrings of them. They cannot appear in the WHERE clause of any SQL query. This is not a data type; this is shared storage. -- Jon -- Jonathan Krueger jkrueger@daitc.daitc.mil uunet!dgis!jkrueger Isn't it interesting that the first thing you do with your color bitmapped window system on a network is emulate an ASR33?