Re: Variable length fields

[Scott Klement <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> I need to store a varying amount of text data in a field in a currently
> non-existent table

You can't store data in a non-existent table :)  (Sorry... bad attempt at 
humor!)


> I have primarily worked with PF's and DDS on the iSeries and done a little
> bit of SQL (create collection, create table, alter table, etc).  What data
> type would work best here?

VARCHAR from SQL, or VARLEN from DDS should end up with the same thing. 
This works very well, but you might want to understand the performance 
implications and how you could optimize them...  There was a discussion 
about this on one of these forums recently (either this one or RPG400-L) 
you might want to search for VARLEN in the archive...


> Looks like varchar would work.  Would that recommendation change if you 
> were using RPG to access the data?

Modern RPG (RPG IV) works extremely well with VARLEN/VARCHAR data.  It 
gets loaded in the RPG program as a VARYING field...

If you tried to use it with the 1980's version of RPG (RPG III, or 
"RPG/400") you may encounter problems.  And RPG II (or, "RPG36") is right 
out. :)