String data type in sqlite - string

Question

I created a table as follows:
create table employers (
id integer primary key,
name string,
surname string,
description string
);
I noticed here that string is not between data types, should I replace it with something else? Is it alias for some other datatype? What is the maximum number of characters that can this string contain?
I used string and it does not make any problems. I'm only interested how is it possible, that I could use string. Is it some alias? What are the possibilities of this type?
thank you

Answer 1

You want to use TEXT which we use whatever it needs to in order to hold your data.
CREATE TABLE Employers (
id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
name TEXT,
surname TEXT,
description TEXT
);
See http://www.sqlite.org/datatype3.html and note:
SQLite uses a more general dynamic
type system. In SQLite, the datatype
of a value is associated with the
value itself, not with its container.
The dynamic type system of SQLite is
backwards compatible with the more
common static type systems of other
database engines in the sense that SQL
statement that work on statically
typed databases should work the same
way in SQLite. However, the dynamic
typing in SQLite allows it to do
things which are not possible in
traditional rigidly typed databases.
That noted:
SQLite does not impose any length
restrictions (other than the large
global SQLITE_MAX_LENGTH limit) on the
length of strings, BLOBs or numeric
values.
Finally:
Maximum length of a string or BLOB
The maximum number of bytes in a
string or BLOB in SQLite is defined by
the preprocessor macro
SQLITE_MAX_LENGTH. The default value
of this macro is 1 billion (1 thousand
million or 1,000,000,000). You can
raise or lower this value at
compile-time using a command-line
option like this:
-DSQLITE_MAX_LENGTH=123456789 The current implementation will only
support a string or BLOB length up to
231-1 or 2147483647. And some built-in
functions such as hex() might fail
well before that point. In
security-sensitive applications it is
best not to try to increase the
maximum string and blob length. In
fact, you might do well to lower the
maximum string and blob length to
something more in the range of a few
million if that is possible.
During part of SQLite's INSERT and
SELECT processing, the complete
content of each row in the database is
encoded as a single BLOB. So the
SQLITE_MAX_LENGTH parameter also
determines the maximum number of bytes
in a row.
The maximum string or BLOB length can
be lowered at run-time using the
sqlite3_limit(db,SQLITE_LIMIT_LENGTH,size)
interface.

Answer 2

Declare your field as "TEXT" and I believe you can specify a length restriction.
so you can declare name TEXT(255) as a 255 character TEXT value.