On 6/5/07, christoph.huesler@css.ch christoph.huesler@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.