6.6.Known Issues
6.6.1.Unsigned Type Handling
Unmanaged ODBC Provider
The provider assumes that all integer data returned by an ODBC driver is signed. The provider only examines the ODBC SQL type of the data to ascertain its type. But, the ODBC SQL type gives no indication of whether the data is signed or unsigned. The ODBC to .NET type mappings used internally for fetched data assume that all data is signed. There is the potential for overflow errors when fetching unsigned integer data, because the .NET types to which integer data is mapped are all signed. However, across the range of databases currently supported by OpenLink, this problem only manifests itself in one instance with the SQL Server TinyInt type. This is the only native unsigned type supported across the databases covered by OpenLink. However, if the ODBC provider is to support third party ODBC drivers, more databases could expose this fault.
The SQL Server TinyInt type has a range of 0 .. 255. It is returned by the provider as a .NET System.SByte type which has a range of 127 .. 128. At present, TinyInt values over 128 will not be returned correctly by the provider.
Managed Providers
The same general problem exists in the GenericClient managed provider. However, the provider handles SQL_TINYINT data as a special case, so the problem with the SQL Server TinyInt type does not arise. If the provider detects data fetched using the OpenLink CTYPE_UNS8 transport type, it changes the mapping for SQL_TINYINT from System.SByte to System.Byte. Any other type of unsigned integer data will not be handled correctly, but at present this does not arise as TinyInt is the only unsigned native DBMS type the provider encounters across our currently supported agents.
6.6.2.Timestamp Precision
Both the managed and unmanaged providers map the ODBC SQL_TYPE_TIMESTAMP type to the .NET DateTime type. The .NET DateTime type stores times with millisecond precision, whereas an ODBC SQL_C_TIMESTAMP struct can hold seconds accurate to nanoseconds. A loss of precision will result when fetching timestamp data from databases which hold fractional second data to greater than millisecond precision. The corresponding DateTime values returned to an application will be rounded to the nearest millisecond.