TEXT and BYTE (LOB) types

Informix®

Informix provides the TEXT, BYTE, CLOB and BLOB data types to store very large texts or binary data.

Legacy Informix 4GL applications typically use the TEXT and BYTE types.

Genero BDL does not support the Informix CLOB and BLOB types.

SAP HANA®

SAP HANA supports several data types for large objects storage:

Table 1. SAP HANA LOB data types
SAP HANA data type	Description
`BLOB`	To store large binary data like images
`CLOB`	To store large ASCII text data
`NCLOB`	To store large UNICODE text data
`TEXT`	Similar to NCLOB, but supports textsearch-features and is only for column-tables

In SAP HANA, The maximum size of an LOB is 2 GB.

Solution

The SAP HANA database interface can convert BDL TEXT data to SAP HANA NCLOB and BYTE data to SAP HANA BLOB.

If you want to use the TEXT type for SAP HANA column-tables, the tables must be created outside Genero BDL programs, or the TEXT data type emulation flag must be set to false when creating tables in BDL programs:

dbi.database.dbname.ifxemul.datatype.text = false

The TEXT and BYTE types translation can be controlled with the following FGLPROFILE entries:

dbi.database.dsname.ifxemul.text = { true | false }
dbi.database.dsname.ifxemul.byte = { true | false }

For more details see IBM Informix emulation parameters in FGLPROFILE.