Hello, can someone please give me a hint, where to find the meaning of the coltype column in syscolumns?

select coltype, count(coltype)
FROM "informix".systables t, "informix".syscolumns c
WHERE t.tabid = c.tabid
AND t.tabtype = 'T' -- exclude views, synonyms, etc.
AND t.tabid >= 100 -- exclude the system catalog
group by coltype
order by coltype

coltype count(coltype)
0 20680
1 187
2 1762
3 120
5 2920
7 75
8 401
10 1535
11 7
12 8
13 629
17 14
40 2
41 1
256 4101
257 21
258 934
259 3
261 419
262 43
263 9
264 38
266 129
269 62
273 2
274 9
296 2

Hi ,

coltype speaks by itself: it means the datatype of the column :-)
each column has a datatype, ranging from usual ones ( integer, smallint, serial, float, smallfloat, date, datetime, decimal, char, varchar, nchar), and custom or opaque ones used generally for datablades or custom functions ( blob,clob, text,byte etc...)

Each coltype value refers either to a specific type ( integer, smallint etc...), or variable one using a formula on this number ( char, varchar, datetime etc).

You can find the definition of those type in $INFORMIXDIR/incl/public/sqltypes.h

The variable types generally use a algoryth based on modulo 256 to get the data type and length.

Hope this helps
Eric