[TYPO3-dev] BLOBs considered harmful

[Martin Kutschker]

Marc Wöhlken [quadracom] schrieb:
> 
> [mysql manual]
> BLOB columns are treated as binary strings, whereas TEXT columns are
> treated according to their character set. For BLOB columns, sorting and
> comparison is case sensitive. For TEXT columns, values are sorted and
> compared based on the collation of the character set assigned to the
> column as of MySQL 4.1. Before 4.1, TEXT sorting and comparison are
> based on the collation of the server character set.
> [/mysql manual]

Same is true for other DBs.

> if these differences do not matter it would be great to switch to text
> fields.

TYPO3 itself doesn't use BLOBs that way. It simply abuses them. In fact 
most of them could even be VARCHAR(255) because they don't need to be very 
large.

Anyway, as those fields are not sorted it doesn't matter if the DB can or 
cannot sort them.

Masi