Posted by peter

MySQL has a lot of string data types - CHAR, VARCHAR, BLOB, TEXT, ENUM and bunch of variants such as VARBINARY but I think it is not enough :)

I would also like to see type HEXCHAR which would be able to store hex strings, such as those returned as MD5() and SHA1() efficiently. With little modification it could work for UUID() as well (it adds some dashes). Currently it is quite inconvenient to deal with strings like that in MySQL. Either you store them as strings and waste space or you spend them as binary and deal with inconvenience of having not readable strings in the table OR adding UNHEX() everywhere - which also adds overhead.
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