[BioSQL-l] Question about VARCHAR BINARY

[Andreas Draeger]

Florian Mittag wrote:
> I'm new to BioSQL and just started using it, when I noticed that some tables 
> contain columns with type VARCHAR BINARY, e.g. the column "name" in the 
> table "biodatabase". May I ask, what is the reason behind this?
> 
> We switched to a DB2 database for some performance issues and set up the 
> BioSQL schema, and MySQL's VARCHAR BINARY corresponds with DB2's VARBINARY, 
> which is somewhat annoying because the content of those columns is displayed 
> hexadecimal on command line interface and the visualizer we are using just 
> shows "BINARY, x bytes".

Dear all,

I encountered the same problem since I am now also using DB2 with 
BioJava bindings using Hibernate.

When retrieving a Namespace object from the biodatabase table, the 
getName() method returns a hexadecimal code instead of the desired name 
String. However, this happened although I queried the database using the 
String "Genebank". This means Hibernate was able to obtain the correct 
object using the name "Genebank", but converts everything to hex codes.

This seems to be related to the column having a binary type. I tried to 
get into this but without any success. It would be great to get any help 
on this.

Cheers,
Andreas

-- 
Dipl.-Bioinform. Andreas Dräger
Eberhard Karls University Tübingen
Center for Bioinformatics (ZBIT)
Sand 1
72076 Tübingen
Germany

Phone: +49-7071-29-70436
Fax:   +49-7071-29-5091