Re: Data Format Brainstorm

[zydyk@cpsc.ucalgary.ca (Mariusz Zydyk)]

Stephen Cacclin (cacclin@vanbc.wimsey.com) wrote:
: Hello all,

: I am looking for some helpful input from the various comp.* communities. 

: Basically I want to know how various databases, languages, protocols etc.
: store different data types. In other words, how are signed/unsigned integers,
: floating point numbers, date types, booleans etc. written to disk?  

: Any database, language, machine type, protocol or other method is welcome! 
: Please feel free to share your most obscure references... 

: *** Please respond with email since I am polling a number of groups. 

------- Since you set the follow-ups to all those newsgroups, a folloup
to your post will be automatically routed to them. Enough of that though...

-------- The way you store anything to disk is up to you, th eprogrammer.
You can usually write non-integer numbers to disk same way they are stored
in memory to conserve space. You might expand them into readable form and
save it with all the decimals which will take up 16 or so bytes. Booleans
are stored any way you want. Write them as strings 'True' & 'False', numbers
0 & -1 or any two numbers, or since you can have only 2 states, compress
8 into one byte, '00000001' would be 7 False and 1 True. Of course it is
easier to use tools provided with the compiler to store data, but even there
you can have lots of ways of doing this.
Most database programs will store the data in some peculiar fashion, and
also encrypted [most likely that is]. To find out their formats look at
some sites [don't know which ones though] for the file format info.

                      --==[> zydyk@cpsc.ucalgary.ca <]==--