Re: Custom types / "long" datatypes in custom functions

David Blasby wrote:

> 2.   Functions
>    Currently, functions cannot send/return non-fixed-length data
> types.  It would be great to be able to either (1) send custom types
> to custom functions OR (2) send BLOB-like things to custom functions.
> (oh, are BLOBs inefficient to use?)

Just to be clear functions can send and return non-fixed length data
types, also known as variable length types. An example is VARCHAR(1000)
which is a character type whose value can be any length from 0
characters to 1000 characters. And VARCHAR(1000) FOR BIT DATA is binary
type whose length can be from 0 bytes to 1000 bytes.

> Currently, I use a "VARCHAR(1000000)" as my Geometry type, and stick a
> base-64 encoding of the binary version of the Geometry inside.  This
> is pretty messy and inefficient.  Not to mention the fact that you can
> run spatial functions on text like 'how now brown cow'.

So does that tell you what path the cow jumped over the moon? :-)

Dan.