LVARCHAR not long enough?

I've got some news for you!  If you had been to the IIUG 2015 Conference last week (April 26-30 2015) you might already know this.  If not, relax, 'cause I was there.

Question: Have you ever had a requirement for a character type that can hold strings longer than the 32K limit on the LVARCHAR type?  Don't want to have to deal with the hassles of storing and retrieving a BLOB or SLOB?

Welcome to Informix version 12.10!  I'm not sure in which sub-release this was actually implemented, but it definitely exists in .xC4 and later.  There is a new extended type, longlvarchar which is limited to 2GB strings!  Strings under 4K are stored in-table like ordinary LVARCHAR values, but longer strings are moved, invisibly, to a SmartBLOB Space.  So, you can now declare:

create table big_stuff (
       really_long_string longlvarchar,
       .....
);

Very cool!  This is a short one, I know, but it's been a busy week getting back into the normal swing of days after returning from San Diego, Mother's Day is ahead, and a short trip to visit a client next week, so I'll have to fill you all in on other things later.  TTFN.