On 6/5/07, christoph.huesler(a)css.ch <christoph.huesler(a)css.ch> wrote:
So, was "hex" in the original message
referring to strings to save some
numeric values?
Answer to all your questions right here: yes. In an ideal world we
could specify the column as GINORMOUSINT(128) FORMAT HEX or something
and have both the efficiency and the prettiness, but alas this isn't
an ideal world, and CHAR/BINARY storage of some kind is needed if you
don't want to split up over multiple columns, and there's no "FORMAT
HEX" in SQL. The question is then whether to store the data as
unreadable binary (debugging, innocent SELECT *'s, and changing
character encodings become fun then, as Brion observes) or as nicely
manageable hex characters at a whole sixteen bytes more per row.