text and image are Adaptive Server datatypes that hold large text or image values. The text datatype holds up to 2,147,483,647 bytes of printable characters. The image datatype holds up to 2,147,483,647 bytes of binary data.
Because they can be so large, text and image values are not actually stored in database tables. Instead, a text pointer to the text or image value is stored in the table.
To ensure that competing applications do not wipe out one another’s modifications to the database, a timestamp is associated with each text or image column. This timestamp is called a text timestamp.
Client-Library stores the text pointer and text timestamp for a text or image column in an I/O descriptor structure, the CS_IODESC. The I/O descriptor for a column also contains other information about the column, including its name and datatype.
For detailed information about the CS_IODESC structure, see “CS_IODESC structure”.
