SQL/database server capabilities

[Kagamin]

Steve Teale Wrote:

> The cases I am moaning about are when I ask for say an eight byte integer 
> from a column that is defined as one, and get back a double-precision 
> floating point - a format not even capable of holding the value. If the 
> server can't return one of the types it supports via its protocol, it 
> should return an error ("not implemented" perhaps).

It seems this has no connection to columns whatsoever. Whatever data you receive from server, it's type is encoded in the received data packet. One may want to match types exactly or do sensible conversions like round a float to int or parse int from string. You don't want to have count(*) return an int32 on mssql and int64 on oracle and crap up if you requested, say, int32.