There are many third party applictions that can access data from 4D Server via the 4D ODBC driver. Not all vendors support column and row (table and field) names of 31 characters like 4D does. Many limit them to something less, such as 30 characters.

4D ODBC driver supports column and row names of 31 characters because other 4D applications can access 4D Server via ODBC. This allows the ODBC client to access the full names of the tables and fields as they are defined on the server.

However, this can cause problems when a third party application attempts to read the 4D system list of tables and fields. If any of the 4D table or field names are 31 characters it can cause an overflow problem on the ODBC client.

In the MSDN documentation to the command SQLGetInfo function in the section titled "SQL Limits" there is a value that the ODBC client should check for possible errors: SQL_MAX_COLUMN_NAME_LEN. Though Microsoft does not publish what this value is, It appears that many vendors set value for this constant at 30.