From: Dan Nelson
Date: August 7 2004 2:10am
Subject: Re: What would you store in a BLOB field?
List-Archive: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql/170491
Message-Id: <20040807021017.GC11465@dan.emsphone.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

In the last episode (Aug 06), Levi Campbell said:
> I know the blob field is binary but what would you store there? and
> if you could give me an example of real-life uses please.

Say you want to have multiple remote webservers all serving the same
data.  Create a table with "filename", "mtime", and "content" fields
and replicate it to a mysql database on each server.  The "content"
field would be a blob.  You could also add custom HTML fields, like
Content-Type: and Expires:.

You could have an employee table, with their photo in a blob field.

You could implement your own full-text index by creating a table next
to a table of documents, with a "word" field, and a blob field
containing a compressed bitmap of documents containing that word. 
Searches would be done by pulling the bitmaps for each search word and
AND/OR'ing them (I have done this; it works well).

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson@stripped