> Rather than a cast, why not just treat a blob as a character
> string?
>

That is good for blobs that hold string data, but not binary.
It would be nice to treat a blob as an array, and be able to cast
elements of that array to a char or int (or vice versa).

You could build stored procedures for any further blob manipulation.
This would keep the needed tools in the engine small yet allow alot of
flexibility.

If you could do the same with strings or byte elements of numbers, you
would make it easy to do any type of manipulation of the data within a
stored procedure.

Small change would open up alot of possibilities.

best regards

Dalton