Would you ever want to do SELECTs based on those fields? If so, you shouldn't put them in the BLOB. Say you had field 'foo' inside the blob. How do you write a SELECT statement to get it out? You can use LIKE clause, but that makes the database do a lot more work, and you'll probably get a some stuff back that you don't care about (depending on the exact structure of the data).

Try to make seperate tables with similar data and JOIN them. That way, you don't waste space on fields you rarely use.

Remember, the 'R' stands for 'Relational'. Don't treat an RDBMS like a flat-file with a weird API.

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I wanted to explore how Perl's closures can be manipulated, and ended up creating an object system by accident.
-- Schemer

Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated

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