[Typo3-dev] DBAL

[Dominic Brander]

Karsten Dambekalns wrote:


>>>I was going to ask exactly the same thing! What are all those blob fields
>>>for?

> They contain serialized PHP arrays as far as I know (I have not looked
> at every field's contents).

within TYPO3 BLOBs are often used to store data you usually would save 
in a mm-table. so the BLOB field contains comma separated data/numbers. 
this shouldn't be a problem when switching from BLOB to TEXT (as long as 
numbers are treated the same way in every character set ;-) ).

> Serialized PHP arrays are suited to be handled as strings inside PHP,
> but they are still binary - they may contain binary 0 and other nifty
> things. It all depends what has been serialized.
> 
> This would not make a big difference with MySQL as it is today, but
> other databases may try to 'help' you with the fields contents. If
> they see a character field and are using a certain charset this could
> be very bad for your data... :)

you are right, serialized data (like in tt_products:status_log) can't be 
stored in a TEXT field: "BLOB columns are treated as binary strings, 
whereas TEXT columns are treated according to their character set." 
(http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/BLOB.html)

cheers

dominic
________________________________________________________________________
dominic brander - snowflake productions gmbh
http://www.snowflake.ch