[CALCITE-1684] Change default precision of VARCHAR and VARBINARY from 1 to "unspecified"

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 1.11.0
• Fix Version/s: 1.12.0
• Component/s: core
• External issue URL: https://github.com/apache/calcite/pull/394
• Assignee: Julian Hyde
• Reporter: Kevin Liew
• Created: 09/Mar/17 00:49
• Updated: 24/Mar/17 03:20
• Resolved: 14/Mar/17 00:38

Description

The behavior for Calcite (and SQL Server) is to set VARCHAR precision to 1 when not specified whereas Phoenix sets the max integer value of 2147483647.

It doesn't really make sense to create a VARCHAR for a max length of 1 (it takes more bytes to store the length of each row than the actual value) and it shouldn't be the default behavior. I think we should adopt the Phoenix behavior. Do we need to make this configurable via SqlConformance or other?

Issue Links

• is depended upon by: PHOENIX-2371 DatabaseMetadata.getColumns() returns bad COLUMN_SIZE for varchar and varbinary columns
• is depended upon by: PHOENIX-3730 Handle unspecified precision and scale for VARCHAR and VARBINARY in Phoenix-Calcite