Appendix A
Mapping FileMaker fields to ODBC data types
This table illustrates how FileMaker field types map to the standard ODBC data types.
String length is optional in table declarations. All strings are stored and retrieved in Unicode.
Notes
1 You can SELECT up to 170 fields at one time from a FileMaker database file; you can UPDATE up to
100 fields at one time.
1 FileMaker supports repeating fields (array data types), but ODBC does not. FileMaker exports
repetitions to tab-delimited or comma-delimited files and separates each repetition with a group separator
(Unicode decimal value 29). Text columns separated with the group separator are concatenated. All other
data types return only the first repetition.
FileMaker field type
Converts to ODBC data
type
About the data type
text SQL_VARCHAR The maximum column length of text is 1 million
characters, unless you specify a smaller Maximum number
of characters for the text field in FileMaker. FileMaker
returns empty strings as NULL.
number SQL_DOUBLE The FileMaker number field type can contain positive or
negatives values as small as 10
-308
, and as large as 10
+308
,
with up to 15 significant digits.
date SQL_DATE
time SQL_TIME The FileMaker time field type can contain the time of day
or a time interval. A time interval is returned as a time of
day, unless it is less than 0 or greater than 24 hours (both
return a value of 0).
timestamp SQL_TIMESTAMP
container (BLOB) SQL_LONGVARBINARY You can retrieve binary data, file reference information, or
data of a specific file type from a container field.
Within a SELECT statement, use the CAST function to
retrieve file reference information, and use the GetAs
function to retrieve data of a specific file type.
calculation The result is mapped to the corresponding ODBC data type.
