Re: Speaking of hex fields, was Re: What exactly is a "Binary Character" field?

On 6/17/15 4:51 PM, CRPence wrote:

The conspicuous difference is the Character Field CCSID (CCSID)
column of SYSCOLUMNS catalog VIEW. The H=Hexadecimal, xxxCHAR FOR BIT
DATA [and BINARY] columns will have CCSID=65535. Otherwise..

Not something I'd call reliable, given that I can easily set that CCSID for an ordinary alphanumeric field.

From a generic\purely SQL perspective, there is no difference between
BINARY, Hex, and FOR BIT DATA; i.e. the columns are all to be treated as
binary\image data for lack of any associated encoding scheme. Thus what
is manifest to the SQL clients via the SQL catalogs need not
differentiate those three. However the differentiation is available in
the Database Cross Reference (DBXREF) file QADBIFLD in the column for
Internal Type (DBIITP).

Now THAT is VERY useful, given that if the DB is DB2/400, my JDBCR4-related project will already know that, and will be able to query QADBIFLD as needed when gathering meta-data, and if it's not, then presumably the Hex field issue won't be relevant.

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JHHL