Re: Why all the max length constraints?

dawn wrote:
> [why all the length constraints?]

You asked a very general question, so I'm going to respond in very general terms.

Length constraints are a physical reality. Your computer is finite, and it can only take so much data before choking. And there are times when software is buggy and will write data forever, filling up your disk or dbms or whatever. It is best if the entire system not die under those circumstances. (There are also times where such bad behavior is deliberate, as in denial-of-service attacks.) So no matter how it appears, there are real limits somewhere. Note that Java strings are conventionally referred to as variable length, but they are in fact a maximum of 2^31 characters long.

Realistically, if you have a field for state/province, and someone enters 6 megabytes of character data, something has gone wrong somewhere. Better to trap it around character 255 than to let it just run along sucking up resources.

There is nothing specific to RM here.

Marshall Received on Sun May 28 2006 - 02:13:17 CEST