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.
