I used it specifically to store large blocks of text for a call center app. Very good there. Filesystem storage is a thorny situation. In the hands of a skilled system administrator, that is very extensible. But the application has to be structured correctly, and as Richard points out it completely fails to work in some environments. <div class="gmail_quote">On Feb 2, 2015 9:02 PM, "Chick Tower" <<a href="mailto:c.e.tower@gmail.com">c.e.tower@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">On 02/02/2015 02:44 PM, Kami Vaniea wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> I've never really tried reading the BLOB data directly from the DB. Normally I just use the DB the same way I would use the file system and code the application I'm writing to visualize whatever the binary is. </blockquote> Thank you, Kami, and everyone else who replied. So it appears that a database would need to be part of a larger application that is able to view whatever BLOBs you store in the database. Some of you made suggestions about better approaches to storing binary data in databases, or whether to even do it. I have no application in mind using BLOBs, nor do I want to swap one database for another. I just had a question. I saw the BLOB storage class, thought "That's cool", but then wondered what use it would be. -- Chick _______________________________________________ linux-user mailing list <a href="mailto:linux-user@egr.msu.edu" target="_blank">linux-user@egr.msu.edu</a> <a href="http://mailman.egr.msu.edu/mailman/listinfo/linux-user" target="_blank">http://mailman.egr.msu.edu/mailman/listinfo/linux-user</a> </blockquote></div>