Re: theory and practice: ying and yang

Paul,

I cannot find anything on overloading SQL operators or functions with the newly made types in SQL server 2005
and I'm not into FirstSQL.

I do know that for SQL Server 2005 user defined types are actually special .NET objects that can live inside a database field (probably a BLOB field of some sort) by using .NET object serialization(i.e. converting the status info of an object to XML and probably compress the XML file and store it in a BLOB field). Defining such an object always requires *the developer* to write a special required method/property called something like ".totext" which returns a (human readable?) string representation of the object. This property needs then to be "exposed" to SQL server.

Knowing this I fear SQL server will use this "totext" property for all operations like ordering/equality etc :(

I'm not sure if I would call this extension of SQL server fully "native".(It is however fully Microsoft;)

Hope this helps,

Regards,

M. Evers aka DM Unseen Received on Thu May 26 2005 - 14:45:43 CEST