If you do have blobs, the preferred way is to not encode them in strings at all, but rather to use prepared statement (which don't involve a conversion to string).
-- Sylvain On Mon, Jul 8, 2013 at 11:07 AM, Pavel Kirienko < pavel.kirienko.l...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi all, > > I am curious why there is BLOB datatype that accepts HEX strings only. > > HEX encoding requires twice as much space as original data, thus it is > rather ineffective. Instead, base64 encoding with ASCII datatype seems more > effective in terms of space, and I believe it doesn't impose noticeable > performance penalty either. > > So, are there any special use cases for BLOBs, or should I give up on them > and use ASCII + base64 for my binaries? > > Thanks in advance, > Pavel. > >
