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Posted by James Fraser on 09/11/07 19:11
I have run into a challenge that I'm not sure how to best solve. I'd
appreciate any opinions or input.
I am working with a third party database. They are storing some data
that I need to use in a binary field. I've got the code to parse the
binary and reconstruct what I need. Unfortunately, there might be
multiple "entries" stored in a single binary field. a certain byte,
let's just say the first, will always be the count of "entries" in
this particular SQL entry.
An example:
then entry might be:
0x01000012341234
where 12341234 is the data entry that I will parse.
Another possible entry is:
0x03000012341234567856789ABC9ABC
The first byte indicates that there are three data values I want to
parse out:
12341234
56785678
9ABC9ABC
The portions of the binary I need are always the same length and there
may be from 1 to ~100 of them. (usually 1 if it matters.)
The big question:
How could a SQL query return an entry for each of the "entries" in the
binary field? For the second example I would want three entries in my
results, each row returning a different section of the binary data.
For the first, only one row. I'll be querying the set and expecting to
get back more results than the number of entries in the set.
I haven't really tried much with this yet, (other than some mental
calisthenics were I fell down onto the mat pretty hard), so just some
direction on where to begin would be helpful.
(Yes, I understand that the difficulty is that this data shouldn't be
stored this way, but there is not much I can do about that.)
Thanks...
James Fraser
jbf1@concentric.net
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