> > I've read the links, hence my skepticism and me labeling this as "yet > another way that SQL Server decides to make things harder and buggy". It is > a bug in SQL Server, unless I'm missing the reason for this to exist (or > maybe there was such a reason in 1991). >
One of the links is MySQL specific. Apart from that, it's not accurate to characterize this as a bug with MSSQL. They used part of the SQL spec in an intended way. Yes, it's a little more cumbersome than having a single string type, but it doesn't help PDO users to wish other designs onto DBs. As for BC compliance, this will still break code, as current overrides to > prepared statements (in DBAL, specifically) directly compare the parameter > type to a constant (no bitmask comparison). > I meant that this change won't break existing code. But yes, others may need to modify their code to be compatible with this new feature. Within pdo, a bitmask is applied -- see uses of the PDO_PARAM_TYPE macro. It's probably worth replicating that in DBAL. Thanks, Adam
