Brian Aker wrote:
Hi!
Is VARBINARY useful?
You can have a 64K binary object that we will sort based on the bits.
It does mean you could look up a record via another one... though that
would be pretty expensive compared to just using a precomputed MD5.
The saving grace of this thing is if you didn't want UTF8 you could
just use it.. though the sort would be all FUBAR because of case.
Sort by varbinary is useless. On another tentacle (leaving myself lots
of room here), something recognizable as binary gook is useful. Whether
something restricted to 65,536 bytes is useful, however, is problematic
(a useful term, not strictly synonymous with bullshit).
So what is a defensible use case for varbinary? A jpeg from a really
bad digital camera? The world's smallest pdf? A non-portable binary
array? A Word document consisting of "Hello, world"?
My intention with Nimbus is to support a universal "bytes" type, with a
runtime check whether to include gook as a field (varbinary) or a blob
(stored as a link to a separate object).
We have too many types. Can we get rid of some? Varbinary is not as
stupid a 3-byte binary, but it comes close.
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