Hi.
Complete n00b here, working from a technical documentation perspective. Drupal lets me store data in a db and display it (or turn it to PDF for printing); that's fine. However, it is imperative that large chunks of data (XML tagged UETF-8 Unicode) can be easily stored and retrieved from my Drupal database. There are two parts to what I must be sure of:
1) Unicode support (CJK, Arabic, etc. must be possible for our customers)
Drupal does this, fine.
2) Data field must be of variable length, with potential for LARGE chunks of data such as an entire chapter. Not all data chunks will be large, but the 4000 characters that varchar supports is already too small.
Folks here at work suggest I use nvarchar, but it seems Drupal does not support it. Maybe I missed the fact that another Drupal-supported db (other than MySQL) handles nvarchar?
Am I missing something obvious?
Lost and new, I throw myself on the mercy of the court.
Michael
Comments
BLOB
For super-large values, the only reliable cross-database field type is BLOB. You can store an XML string into a BLOB field just fine, and in Drupal 7 all of the cross-DB weirdness of that is handled for you automatically. That can then be retrieved and printed/rendered/whatevered.
BLOB is what in Drupal 7 is used for node bodies, which can grow quite large.