[MySQL] blob vs text

[redhead]

Hello all,

I know I can find this info by searching the mysql site, but since I don't have the patience to look for it, I'm asking here. Plus others might benefit from it.

My concerns goes towards the MySQL storing of something declared as blob and something declared as text As to if operations performed on one thing would be slower than on the other.

MySQL claims the only difference in that blob is case-sensitive, where text is case-insensitive.

http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/BLOB.html

The four TEXT types TINYTEXT, TEXT, MEDIUMTEXT, and LONGTEXT correspond to the four BLOB types and have the same maximum lengths and storage requirements. The only difference between BLOB and TEXT types is that sorting and comparison is performed in case-sensitive fashion for BLOB values and case-insensitive fashion for TEXT values. In other words, a TEXT is a case-insensitive BLOB. No case conversion takes place during storage or retrieval.

But performance on the two.. Is there something to gain by chosing case-insensitive? If you're not requiering any case sensitivity. Or is there faster access with case-sensitive, since I'm guessing insensitive means converting every letter to capital, given that most letters are in small printing, it might be faster not to convert them.

[sde]

hey red, .. what did you find out about this?

[redhead]

I havn't looked any further into it, I decided to go with text types all over the site, since that made it very easy to make everything searchable, not worrying about case sensitivity..
Since it's only during storage and retrieval the conversion takes place, I'm guessing text is the faster one.
But only slightly..