> >This has the same problem that has Roman upset -- the inability
> >to do direct access into a compressed file. I tried to convince
> >him decompressing the blob was good enough, but this clearly
> >doesn't work for a multi-gigabyte database file.
>
> For a multi-gigabyte database file, anything seems to be not
> good enough --except perhaps storing it on a cluster with RAIDs.

In many cases BLOB compression is good, and it will be "a good thing"
(tm) to provide BLOB compression. The only thing what I ask is a
possibility to switch the compression off (and keep the seek operation
on BLOB). If new data type is not good enough, I would agree on a
database property that can be defined during database creation. Or
even config parameter. :)

Roman