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 CLOB or NCLOB and BYTE data to SAP HANA BLOB.

Depending on the FGLPROFILE entry dbi.database.dbname.ifxemul.nationalchars, the TEXT type name in SQL statements is converted to CLOB (for ASCII-7 data storage), or NCLOB (for ISO-8859-? or UTF8 data storage).
Important: The dbi.database.dbname.ifxemul.nationalchars FGLPROFILE entry defaults to false, and CHAR/VARCHAR/TEXT SQL type names will be converted to NVARCHAR/CLOB SAP HANA types for simple ASCII-7 storage. Force this entry to true, if your application is using an ISO-8859-? or UTF-8 locale.
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.datatype.text = { true | false }
dbi.database.dsname.ifxemul.datatype.byte = { true | false }
For more details see IBM Informix emulation parameters in FGLPROFILE.