Store text in BLOB?
forum, php
Solution
A blob is just a bunch of bytes. An arbitrary number of bytes, nothing more.
If you were to store text as a blob, you'd have to worry about encoding (the process of translating text to bytes). But if you store things as text whatever database transport your using will make sure that the text stored in the database is properly encoded and decoded for both efficient storage and easy use.
If you're planning to store text, you should store text.
phpBB could implement text encoding and decoding themselves and that could be one reason to use blob instead of text. It's unlikely but sometimes text data types have a maximum length, the blob might be a work around for phpBB in this particular instance.
Problem
I'm making a little forum for my clans website. I'm wondering if I should store the thread text in TEXT or BLOB? Whats the difference? I've seen that phpBB does that. What is BLOB anyway? cant find much about it on Google.