[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Field (MARC Tag) Size Capacity

[Mike Rylander]

On 5/2/07, Fitzgerald, Carol <Carol_Fitzgerald at nrel.gov> wrote:
>
> Several years ago, when we were with a different vendor, we migrated our
> database to a test version of our vendor's new version.  We were required to
> truncate or eliminate some of our lengthier note fields at that time.  The
> reason given by the vendor's techs was that SQL couldn't handle that much
> data in those fields.  With our new vendor, we're not seeing any problem
> with lengthy abstracts in the MARC 520 tag.  I am curious to know if such
> limitations exist with Evergreen.
>

The short answer is "no."  The slightly longer answer is, there is no
practical limit, and certainly not imposed by the database.  We store
MARCXML in a Postgres TEXT field, and that field type can hold up to
2GB of text.

For comparison, the MARC transmission format only supports a total
record size of 100KB and (if I recall correctly) 10KB for specific
fields.

Hope that helps!

-- 
Mike Rylander