maria-developers team mailing list archive

[Christian Massey <krismassey74@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

I am Christian Massey a computer science student at York University and I
wish to work on Providing import and export functions for popular data
formats like JSON, XML , PHP, ... for Connector/C and MariaDB Server. I
have been inspecting the code to understand how the dynamic column packed
string is encoded and I see kind on big endian encoding( Correct me if I am
wrong please).

Also I see that the old format already work like arrays and it uses 3 bits
for encoding type which is the main reason why not all types  in the
enum are supported in this old format.

     DBUG_ASSERT(((type - 1) & (~7)) == 0); /* fit in 3 bits */

(Again please correct me if I am wrong. The encoding is not easy to
understand)

My Question is do we need to create a completely new type to support arrays
or do we change the old format which already work like arrays in a way but
lacks support for some types(I don't know which of the enums yet).

Please, I wish to write a proposal for this project and hope to discuss
more with mentors for more clarification on how we are going to implement
this as it seems to be a very important if not the most critical part of
this project.


Cheers,
Kris.