All, Any thoughts on using the first byte of a BLOB to indicate what kind of data that BLOB contains?
For example: 0 = plain old bytes 1 = 16 bit integers 2 = 32 bit integers 3 = singles 4 = doubles, etc. I am forced to consider this approach because my function will be receiving blobs but will have no idea what those blobs are. However, I can ask the sender to prepend the blob with an indicator byte to provide the necessary information. In the past I have used comments in the table structure and even used custom types (e.g. i16BLOB, for a blob that contains 16 bit ints), but in this case I will not have access to that information. The data is coming to me in the form of an ADO.NET DataTable which does not contain such information. Of course tagging the blobs like this will increase the size of the database, but not by much, and if this "feature" is not clearly documented someone in the future will have a very hard time figuring out why the blobs don't make sense. Is there anything else I should be aware of? Thanks, Bill
