design

We have sometimes discussions with our customers whether to store LOBs (Large Objects) in the database or not. To not rephrase the arguments again and again I have summarized them in the following lines.

The following items are more or less valid for all large data types (BLOB, TEXT and theoretically also for JSON and GIS columns) stored in a MySQL or MariaDB (or any other relational) database.

Abstract:

It is common practice in MySQL table design that fields are declared as NOT NULL but some non-sense DEFAULT values are specified for unknown field contents. In this article we show why this behavior is non optimal an why you should better declare a field to allow NULL values and use NULL values instead of some dummy values.