Phillip Pearson - web + electronics notes

tech notes and web hackery from a new zealander who was vaguely useful on the web back in 2002 (see: python community server, the blogging ecosystem, the new zealand coffee review, the internet topic exchange).

2003-2-1

InterBase key lengths

Odd - I don't seem to be able to create an index (or a primary key) on the combination of a CHAR(10), a VARCHAR(255) and a TIMESTAMP column in my Firebird database.

How to Determine the Maximum Index Key Length in InterBase (by Jim Starkey, InterBase's author).

More trivia - the core InterBase module is called 'JRD' - Jim's Relational Database. Heh.

InterBase trivia

In MySQL I'm accustomed to using AUTO_INCREMENT columns to automatically generate unique primary keys for my data. Access does something similar with its AutoNumber type, and I think MSSQL does too. Postgres and Oracle have these things called 'sequences' which are like little single-value tables that store the next value to use.

I've been hunting through the InterBase docs to find out what it does, and it looks like it's got something like sequences, except called generators.

Aside: It looks like the Data Definition Guide is going to be the most useful of the many manuals.