I've started to run into the following error :-
ElevateDB Error #100 There is an error in the metadata for the column test
(The size is above the maximum of 1024)

Sometimes my customers need custom reports with quite a lot of string
concatenation. I can understand that a single VARCHAR field must be limited
but should a concatenated string have the same limitation?

In other words, presume "tbl" has fld1, fld2 and fld3 which are all
VARCHAR(512), then the following SQL will fail :-
SELECT fld1 + ' ' + fld2 + ' ' + fld3 from tbl

Is this by design?

I've noticed that CREATE VIEW also fails for some of my customers if the
VIEW contains a concatenated string which may exceed the 1024 character
limit.

Is there any way around this?

Thanks,

Hedley

Hedley,

<< Is this by design? >>

Indirectly, yes.  The issue is the limitation on VARCHAR column lengths.  I
can look into automatically having the engine adjust the size or data type
to a CLOB.

<< Is there any way around this? >>

Sure, just CAST() the whole expression as a CLOB, or add a LEFT() function
call around the whole thing so that it is truncated to 1024 characters.

--
Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com

Hi Tim,

Sorry I've not replied sooner. I just downloaded build 12 and it looks like
you've sorted it - many thanks. As my app has the ability to switch between
different back ends, I try to keep my SQL as 'standard' and universal as
possible so having to cast it to a CLOB would have been a real pain.

I'm guessing you changed the engine to implicitly change the data type to a
CLOB?

Thanks again,

Hedley

Hedley,

<< I'm guessing you changed the engine to implicitly change the data type to
a CLOB? >>

Yes, unfortunately that's the only other option other than the exception (at
least for EDB, you could still opt to truncate the expression, if you'd
like).  BYTE and VARBYTE columns get converted into BLOB columns, also.

--
Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com