Why do varchar/char datatypes not appear with the correct precision in Borland DBExplorer -OR- why do all varchar/char precisions appear as 128?
When using the 6.4 protocol, this problem should not be an issue. Prior to the PostgreSQL 6.4 protocol, the backend did not return the size of varchar/char datatypes in a query result and Borland relies heavily on this for both simple queries and the data dictionary import. Therefore, there are several driver options that were developed to help out with this. • Parse Statements option — driver parses the SQL statement and retrieves characteristics such as precision, nullability, aliases, etc. for the columns. • Unknown Sizes option — “longest” will return the precision based on the longest data of all the rows in the result set. Currently, if the parse statements option is enabled, the parser will fallback on executing the statement if it cannot deal with a particular column. Therefore, it is a good idea to set the unknown sizes to “longest” as well.
