Mertech Flex2SQL Tech Blog

Working with new SQL Server 2008 data types

Riaz Merchant — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 13:07:00 +0000

DataFlex only supports five physical data types: NUMERIC, ASCII, DATE, TEXT and BINARY. The sixth, OVERLAP, is a logical type which maps to any one of the physical types. In the SQL world however, there are many different data types that the driver has to support. This is especially important when you are connecting [...]

New Feature: Lazy Open Mode

kristenb — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 22:33:25 +0000

Mertech’s new Lazy Open mode feature is designed to improve an application’s initialization performance by deferring table setup. Lazy Open mode delays the setup of table metadata (table, columns, indexes description) in memory until a field is accessed, even if an OPEN command is issued. Lazy Open mode is particularly useful for applications that open a [...]

Custom OEM to ANSI Translation

kristenb — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 16:34:32 +0000

Mertech’s drivers have a standard OEM to translation based on the Windows API. When this feature is enabled, data sent to the SQL database is translated from the OEM to ANSI Character set and from ANSI to OEM before the data is sent back to the application. The new version 11 drivers have a new feature [...]

Case handling

gandalf — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 18:03:49 +0000

With previous driver versions, Mertech allowed object names to be either all upper case or all lower case. The field names followed the convention selected for the table name. Now users are able to determine how the driver handles table and field names. Convert to upper case Convert to lower case Keep all cases as stored in Dataflex NOTE: The [...]

Blob Handling in DataFlex with Mertech’s Drivers

Riaz Merchant — Tue, 10 May 2011 19:48:52 +0000

BLOBs (binary large object) are very large, variable length, binary or character data objects. BLOBS are typically documents (e.g., .pdf, .doc) or pictures (e.g., .jpeg, .gif, .bmp). NOTE: Related terms, LOB (large object) and CLOB (character large object in Oracle), are used to refer to large objects consisting entirely of text data. BLOBs can either be stored [...]