Using JDBC (Java) always provides a lot of information about the result of a query. This is sometimes crucial, i. e. to know whether to display the result of a column left flush (strings) or right flush (numbers).

TDBC (Tcl database connectivity) seems to lack this capability. While it is true that within Tcl "everything is a string", it is sometimes necessary to know whether something is numeric, date, string or whatever kind of data type a result column has.

It's easy to ask the database for the column types of existing tables or views, but an individual query with computed columns can deliver values of types unknown beforehand. An easy example for this is SELECT current_timestamp; - there is no table you could ask for the data type.

Since I was so desperate, I created a temporary view with the SELECT statement and asked this temporary view for its column information. But this workaround should really not be necessary.

I wouldn't regard it a problem if the data types were different depending on the database system. Since there are so many different datatypes, some of which are not available in other systems, we have to deal with differences anyway.