Plan for Python 3.0 (and IronPython) implementation -- all strings are unicode, and bytes are different from strings. IMHO it is very important to have two distinct types. All of the stickiest problems in getting adodbapi to work in all three dialects were in this area. -- Vernon Cole <div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 4:17 PM, Jason Baker <<a href="mailto:jbaker@zeomega.com">jbaker@zeomega.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> As of right now, it looks like storm provides one datatype for VARCHAR2 and Binary data. This makes sense for databases like MySQL and Postgres where you can essentially treat them as the same datatype. So for instance, this will work under MySQL: mysql> CREATE TABLE t (c BINARY(3)); Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec) mysql> INSERT INTO t SET c = 'z'; Query OK, 1 row affected (0.01 sec) However, Oracle relies on these values being hex: SQL> CREATE TABLE t (c RAW(3)); Table created. SQL> INSERT INTO t VALUES ('z') 2 ; INSERT INTO t VALUES ('z') * ERROR at line 1: ORA-01465: invalid hex number Instead, we have to convert it to hex: SQL> INSERT INTO t VALUES (rawtohex('z')); 1 row created. This makes it problematic to have the back end accept one data type for both ascii character strings and binary data because there's not really any way to know if the value should be hexlified or not. Of course the ideal solution is to just use unicode for all strings, but that's very much a massive undertaking for an established code-base as there are a lot of "devil's in the details" type issues along with potential performance problems. Would there be enough of a benefit for everybody to have separate classes for binary and ascii data, or is this something we should just use internally? -- storm mailing list <a href="mailto:storm@lists.canonical.com">storm@lists.canonical.com</a> Modify settings or unsubscribe at: <a href="https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/storm" target="_blank">https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/storm</a> </blockquote></div>