Re: st: could it be a bug in odbc??

["Joseph Coveney" <jcoveney@bigplanet.com>]

Tashi Lama wrote:

   I posted this question yesterday and failed to hear any responses. Could be
because the way I framed my question. So, I am attempting to make it more clear
and concise. The problem is with odbc running in unix. I have a table
"readership" in mysql which has a column doc_title of type varchar. While
running in windows, odbc imports that column in stata with data type string.
This runs in par with the stata documentation which lists string as the
corresponding stata datatype to varchar in SQL. The problem arises while running
Stata in unix. Stata skips the the column doc_title and gives the following
notice. 
note: doc_title is of a type not supported in Stata; skipped

This is so confusing. Did anyone encounter this problem? Any hint or solution
will be highly appreicated.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I don't know anything about MySQL, but is sounds as if your settings for the
VARCHAR columns or for the Unix ODBC driver are telling Stata that the VARCHAR
columns are coming across as BLOB or as Unicode.  Stata cannot read those, and
so it gives the "type not supported" error.  

It's just a guess, but I cannot imagine that whatever our problem is is inherent
in MySQL under Unix.  There  are several others on this list who I believe use
MySQL, perhaps also under Unix or Linux, and if what your experiencing were an
ingrained bug (as opposed to some kind of settings problem), it would probably
have come up before.

Check the way that you've got MySQL and the ODBC driver set up on your
equipment:  see whether your VARCHAR columns are set up as something analogous
to Microsoft SQL Server's VARCHAR(MAX) (that is, similar to a BLOB), or whether
there's a toggle setting for the ODBC driver somewhere having to do with
automatically converting character data into Unicode or something during
passage.

Joseph Coveney


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