Re: bytea/ODBC/MSAccess issue

Tom Lane wrote:

> Joe Conway <joseph(dot)conway(at)home(dot)com> writes:
>
>>When creating a linked table in MS Access, bytea columns get mapped to
>>"OLE Object" as a datatype, and this type is not able to be indexed.
>>
>
> Could we make our ODBC driver map bytea to some datatype that Access
> doesn't choke on?
>

I did a bit of testing, and it seems that the MS Access "Memo" datatype
(which PostgreSQL TEXT maps to) can handle zero bytes. The help page has
this to say:

"Up to 65,535 characters. (If the Memo field is manipulated through DAO
and only text and numbers [not binary data] will be stored in it, then
the size of the Memo field is limited by the size of the database.)"

So it seems to indicate it will work for bytea up to 65K in size. I
guess it would be ideal if we could control the mapping through the ODBC
settings dialog (i.e. either map bytea to Memo or OLE Object as options).

I've never hacked on ODBC before, but I guess I'll take a look. Is the
release cycle for ODBC tied to that of the main distribution? If so, I
guess this is a 7.3 fix.

> Sooner or later our response to this sort of problem will have to be
> "MS Access will be first against the wall when the revolution comes".

:)

> In the meantime I'm willing to entertain marginal hacks in ODBC...
>

I don't use MS Access very often, and could easily do without this
change myself, but it is a likely source of complaints after 7.2 is
released if nothing is done about it.

Joe