some problems about sapdb's long(varchar) column

[pawa]

Hi everyone :

I am newbie to sapdb ,there are some problems when i use it.

Some of my table in sapdb have long(varchar) cloumns ,how can i get this column lenth or
use sonm compare clauses? Just like : select * from sometable where longcolumn lik
'%searchwords%' ... ect .

When i check out the documention , some explain is :
------------------------
A LONG column is a data type that contains a sequence of characters of any length to which
no functions can be applied.
-----------------------

It is really ?

It's a big problem for me , thanks for your helping !