Re: Max length of a VARYING field

But there is a practical real-world need to store large varying length
text in a single DB2 column. Not terabytes, but say a megabyte.

I agree, although I think the capability tends to get abused.

Absolutely! I don't think we're going to defend anything from abuse, but it is sort of silly to think about storing a movie as part of a customer record. Unless your web customer is a viola student showing off her skills with a clip or two... It's a new era, and I've been recently... encouraged to think outside the unit-record box.

Isn't this what a Datalink field does for you? The concern with datalinks,
though, is that they aren't saved and restored with the SQL data.

Exactly, and so now we step straight into RPG's strong/weak point -- the tight integration with DB2 for i5 OS. Without that tight integration, RPG is just a funky scripting language for SQL. With it, the compiler folks need the database folks to er, cooperate :-)

All because we RPG programmers would like to store a _little_ more than 32k in a database column. It's been a fun thread!
--buck