Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: silly question #2: why base64?

[Daniel THOMPSON]

On Wed, 2005-09-21 at 21:10 +0100, Bruce Stephens wrote:
> > Isn't sqlite supposed to be binary-safe?
> > Well, except from \0, AFAIR, but shouldn't avoiding that be way faster
> > and smaller than full base64?
> 
> I think the plan is to use BLOBs at some point.  I don't know why it
> wasn't done that way to begin with; maybe sqlite didn't support them,
> or the API was sufficiently annoying, or there were odd restrictions,
> or maybe it was simply convenience (if all your data is ASCII, then
> it's easier to mess about with).

I think that the reason for avoiding BLOBs (at least for the moment) is
exactly this simplicity of messing about with.

In particular the db dump and db restore stuff which is mostly used for
debugging or disaster recovery is very easy to implement if none of the
data in the database is in binary form.

-- 
Daniel Thompson (STMicroelectronics) <address@hidden>
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