Thunderstone Support Forums

Hi all,

We're using version 4.04.1067366033 of texis here, and I was wondering how I could go about determining the largest value sitting in a given column?

For instance, say I have an Author field; I'd like to know who has the longest name and how many characters it is. Thanks!

select max(length(Author)) from Table

will give you the length of the longest Author. That doesn't give you the name of that Author. You might also want:

select Author, length(Author) from Table order by 2 desc

will list all the authors by length of name, so if you just pluck off the first value you'll have a name.

Thanks John!

Hi again,

This function works great...except when I tried it on a blob field. Is there a similar method I can use to find the max length in that column?

Try converting it to varchar first convert(Author,'varchar')

Thanks-- I got what I needed by running a select and ordering by length, in descending sequence.

For some reason though, when I tried using max --as in "max(length(convert(myblob,'varchar')))"-- I received an "ABEND: signal 11" error? Not sure why, it cropped up immediately after the tsql command.

ABEND means texis had problems handling that query. What version of texis?