When using either the high-level or low-level interfaces of the Data Access Manager, by default the text is coerced to return as text strings. There are routines that allow a programmer to install and remove their own result handlers to override this (DBInstallResultHandler, DBRemoveResultHandler, see IM VI 8-65), but if the underlying database adaptor is Data Access Language, it must also be coerced to return non-text data as well. If you don't take that step then DAL will return data to DAM as text and your own result handlers will not be called.