Added in: 1.5

Description

BIGINT is the SQL99-compliant 64-bit signed integer type. It is available in Dialect 3 only.

BIGINT numbers range from -263 .. 263-1, or -9,223,372,036,854,775,808 .. 9,223,372,036,854,775,807.

Example

create table WholeLottaRecords (
  id bigint not null primary key,
  description varchar(32)
)

See also:

BIGINT

Changed in: 2.1

Description

Text BLOBs of any length and character set (including multi-byte sets) are now supported by practically every internal text function and operator. In a few cases there are limitations or bugs.

Level of support

• Full support for:
  • = (assignment);
  • =, <>, «/color>, <color #c3c3c3>⇐, >, >= and synonyms (comparison);
  • || (concatenation);
  • BETWEEN, IS [NOT] DISTINCT FROM, IN, ANY | SOME and ALL.
• Partial support for STARTING [WITH], LIKE and CONTAINING: an error is raised if the second argument is 32 KB or longer.
• SELECT DISTINCT, ORDER BY and GROUP BY work on the BLOB ID, not the contents. This makes them as good as useless, except that SELECT DISTINCT weeds out multiple NULLs, if present. GROUP BY behaves oddly in that it groups together equal rows if they are adjacent, but not if they are apart.
• Any issues with BLOBs in internal functions and aggregate functions are discussed in their respective sections.

Changed in: 2.0

Description

In Firebird 2.0, several enhancements have been implemented for text BLOBs:

• DML COLLATE clauses are now supported.
• Equality comparisons can be performed on the full BLOB contents.
• Character set conversions are possible when assigning a BLOB to a BLOB or a string to a BLOB.

When defining binary BLOBs, the mnemonic binary can now be used instead of the integer 0.

Examples

select NameBlob from MyTable
  where NameBlob collate pt_br = 'João'

create table MyPictures (
  id int not null primary key,
  title varchar(40),
  description varchar(200),
  picture blob sub_type binary
)

See also:

• BLOB
• Blob filter

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Added in: 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, 2.1

The following table lists the character sets added in Firebird.

Table 4.1. Character sets new in Firebird

(*) In Firebird 1.5, UTF8 is an alias for UNICODE_FSS. This character set has some inherent problems. In Firebird 2, UTF8 is a character set in its own right, without the drawbacks of UNICODE_FSS.

See also:

• Character sets
• Default character set
• SET NAMES
• Firebird 2.0 Language Reference Update: Character set NONE
• Firebird 2.1 Release Notes: International language support (INTL)
• Firebird 2.1 Release Notes: Appendix B: International character sets
• Overview of the main character sets in Firebird
• Character sets and Unicode in Firebird
• Convert your Firebird applications to Unicode

Changed in: 1.5.1

Description

Firebird 1.5.1 has improved the way character set NONE data are moved to and from fields or variables with another character set, resulting in fewer transliteration errors. For more details, see the Note at the end of the book.

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Added in: 1.0, 1.5, 1.5.1, 2.0

The following table lists the collations added in Firebird. The Details column is based on what has been reported in the Release Notes and other documents. This information is almost certainly incomplete; some collations with an empty Details field may still be case insensitive (ci), accent insensitive (ai) or dictionary-sorted (dic).

Please note that the default – binary – collations for new character sets are not listed here, as doing so would add no meaningful information.

Table 4.2. Collations new in Firebird

A note on the UTF8 collations: The UCS_BASIC collation sorts in Unicode code-point order: A, B, a, b, á… This is exactly the same as UTF8 with no collation specified. UCS_BASIC was added to comply with the SQL standard.

The UNICODE collation sorts using UCA (Unicode Collation Algorithm): a, A, á, b, B…

UNICODE_CI is truly case-insensitive. In a search for e.g. 'Apple', it will also find 'apple', 'APPLE' and 'aPPLe'.

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Added in: 2.1

Firebird now comes with UNICODE collations for all the standard character sets. However, except for the ones listed in the new collations table in the previous section, these collations are not automatically available in your databases. Instead, they must be added with the CREATE COLLATION statement, like this:

create collation ISO8859_1_UNICODE for ISO8859_1

The new Unicode collations all have the name of their character set with _UNICODE added. (The built-in Unicode collations for UTF8 are the exception to the rule.) They are defined, along with the other collations, in the manifest file fbintl.conf in Firebird's intl subdirectory.

Collations may also be registered under a user-chosen name, e.g.:

create collation LAT_UNI for ISO8859_1 from external ('ISO8859_1_UNICODE')

See CREATE COLLATION for the full syntax.