The driver author is Edmund Mergl. He can be contacted via the I mailing list. Some platforms also support the int8 type.
C always returns all numbers as strings.
All string data types have a limit of 4096 bytes. The CHAR type is fixed length and blank padded. There is no special handling for data with the 8th bit set. They are stored unchanged in the database. None of the character types can store embedded nulls and Unicode is not formally supported.