Re: Why all the max length constraints?


Marshall wrote:
dawn wrote:
[why all the length constraints?]

You asked a very general question, so I'm going to respond in
very general terms.

Length constraints are a physical reality.

Yes, the computer needs to allocate space somehow. Understood. I
don't tell it when I start a new Word document how much space to use,
but I might get a message that I'm out of space and not be able to save
it.

Your computer is finite,
and it can only take so much data before choking.

Thanks, Marshall, but with explanations like that I'm worried that you
are buying into the Fox news spin on my intellect too ;-)

And there are
times when software is buggy and will write data forever, filling
up your disk or dbms or whatever.

Most assuredly

It is best if the entire system
not die under those circumstances.

I knew I would learn something new from you ;-)

(There are also times where
such bad behavior is deliberate, as in denial-of-service attacks.)
So no matter how it appears, there are real limits somewhere.

Yes.

Note that Java strings are conventionally referred to as variable
length, but they are in fact a maximum of 2^31 characters long.

I am only referring to logical variaibility, so I think of Java String
as logically having a similar spec to a Pick attribute. Are you
wishing that you had to put a max length on every declaration of a
variable of type String? I'm not.

Realistically, if you have a field for state/province, and someone
enters 6 megabytes of character data, something has gone wrong
somewhere.

Yes, and there should be no data entry widget that permits entry of
more than 2 characters for a state code, for example, more likely
selecting from a drop-down.

Better to trap it around character 255 than to
let it just run along sucking up resources.

I do want the software product (as a whole) to limit anything which has
a conceptual limit.

There is nothing specific to RM here.

In the other response I gave, I asked questions related to how those
dbms systems where attributes have variable length seem to also be the
ones that do not have the unordered requirement of the RM. Also, might
set processing have anything to do with it? In other words, are you
sure that it is just a coincidence that all existing implementations
(flawed though they may be) of the RM work extensively with length
constraints while many of those (not all, for sure) that do not
implement the RM (whether OO, XML, MV, MUMPS?...) are more inclined
toward variable lengths.

--dawn

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Why all the max length constraints?
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