Re: Bug in 7.4_213 driver: returns VARCHAR instead of

[Oliver Jowett <oliver(at)opencloud(dot)com>]

j.random.programmer wrote:

> Why are the getXXXStream methods "rarely the correct
> thing" ?
> Ignoring current implementation artifacts (if any),
> they
> are almost always the _right_ thing for large amounts
> of
> data.

The point is that it *is* all about current implementation artifacts. 
There's no way to stream a text value from the server on demand using 
the current protocol. So if you use getXXXStream() with the current 
driver, you always end up wrapping data that's completely on-heap anyway 
with an unnecessary stream interface. Note that this is more of a 
client/server protocol issue than a driver issue (and it's not obvious 
how to solve it at the protocol level anyway).

As Barry said, returning LONGVARCHAR implies the preferred access method 
is via getXXXStream() (see the jdbc type mapping tables), but those 
aren't the best methods for accessing text columns in our current 
implementation. And the metadata should reflect the characteristics of 
the driver implementation actually used, surely..

-O