FreeTDS Development Group

["Lowden, James K" <LowdenJK AT bernstein.com>]

> From: Michael Peppler
> Sent: Thursday, April 21, 2005 11:53 AM
> 
> On Thu, 2005-04-21 at 15:54, martin martin wrote:
> > Hello, I have some problems passing binary data to stored procedures
using 
> > db-lib. The parameter is a SYBIMAGE(IMAGE TYPE IN SQLSERVER)
> 
> I don't know about MS-SQL, but for Sybase you can't pass IMAGE types
as
> parameters to a stored proc, and this may be reflected in the
DB-Library
> API.

That was my initial reaction, and I probably relied on the Sybase docs.
At some point along the way, though Microsoft lifted that restriction.
On our 2000 server, I wrote a procedure that accepts a TEXT parameter.
And the dbrpcparam Books Online entry includes this:

===
maxlen

For variable-length return parameters (when type is SQLCHAR, SQLBINARY,
SQLTEXT, or SQLIMAGE), maxlen is the maximum desired byte length for the
value parameter returned from a stored procedure.
===

It's a little hard to imagine managing image data as a parameter in the
general case.  Parameters (as we implement them) reside in virtual
memory, which a single TEXT parameter could potentially exhaust on a
32-bit machine.  But I can see how in the non-general case it would be
convenient.  A varchar can be 8000 bytes; if your document is 15,000
bytes, it would be nice to be able to treat as a "supervarchar".  

--jkl


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