On Sep 23, 2012, at 12:37 PM, Baruch Burstein <bmburst...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I am curious about the usefulness of sqlite's "unique" type handling, and > so would like to know if anyone has ever actually found any practical use > for it/used it in some project? I am referring to the typeless handling, > e.g. storing strings in integer columns etc., not to the non-truncating > system e.g. storing any size number or any length string (which is > obviously very useful in many cases). > Has anyone ever actually taken advantage of this feature? In what case? Not used this feature in SQLite itself, but Oracle has such a construct as well, poetically named ANYDATA [1]. Personally, I think I used such polymorphic column type precisely once: to store different type of preferences (string, date, number, etc) into one column instead of multiple ones. The same effect could have been achieve using just a text column I guess. All in all, I find such typeless columns rather confusing, ungainly to use, and error prone, and always take care of casting everything to their appropriate type to avoid unexpected surprises. See the many previous threads on the mailing list related to type confusion and its unforeseen side-effects... [1] http://www.orafaq.com/node/1853 _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list sqlite-users@sqlite.org http://sqlite.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
