Re: SQL Humor
Date: 19 Aug 2005 10:01:00 -0700
Message-ID: <1124470860.929327.139870_at_f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>
JT wrote:
> There is a TEXT datatype that supports up to 2 GB. However, such free form
> datatypes require more meta data overhead, and it's bad design practice to
> store blobs of text in a relational database.
Think about it for a minute. You have varchar2 limited to 4000 bytes. Then you have text to cover 4K to 2G range. Then you have to rely on some other option to be able store data bigger than 2G (split it into chunks in your application????).
If you suggested such a design to programmic language community, you would be laughed at. Of course, you have a performance disclamer to back you up, while in reality there is nothing that makes text datatype inherently less performant than varchar2. In fact, those ugly length limited datatypes are just artifacts of the early SQL days, when Fortran was the most popular programming language, and datatypes with dynamic memory managenent were yet to become mainstream. Received on Fri Aug 19 2005 - 19:01:00 CEST