ALPHANUM datatype contains non-alphanumeric character like @#$&*

Question

Hi All,
I use ALPHANUM datatype in one table with 127 size. As per definition in Developer guide
"ALPHANUM(n) data type specifies a variable-length character string which contains alphanumeric characters"
Example :
insert into "SOMNATH"."aadata" values(to_ALPHANUM ('!@#$%')) ;
insert into "SOMNATH"."aadata" values(')(*&!@#$%') ;
Above statement executed successfully. So HANA cannot check alphanumeric char. at the time of insertion or any other reason?
Message was edited by: Tom Flanagan

Answer 1

Hmm... not sure about PASAL ... never heard of that one and it doesn't pop up in my search engine of choice.
But as you describe it, it seems to be a standard/convention on how to name your variables.
Limiting what type of characters can be entered into the system definitively limits the portability of your application. Something that might not be relevant today, but very likely tomorrow...
Take the user name in SAP HANA for an example. With SPS8 our development finally made the move to allow NVARCHAR characters as user names - allowing chinese, indian, thai, israeli ... users to choose names for user accounts in the alphabet that is right for them.
Concerning processing and memory consumption: I don't really see the point in bringing up a link to a MS SQL Server blog here.
MS SQL Server encodes data very differently from SAP HANA. And Oracle stores data differently than IBM DB 2 and mySQL stores data differently than PostgreSQL ....
What I can say is: as long as you don't put in "international" characters into a NVARCHAR column, memory and processing requirements are the same as for VARCHAR.
It's easy to try out.
So, using the VARCHAR instead of NVARCHAR only limits the application but won't save a lot of resources (as long as you don't actually use the extended character set)
- Lars