> That's true on disk, but the in-memory internal format is fixed length
> record buffers. So yes, arbitrary length strings would be a big deal.

Some time ago we were talking about improving the BLOB performance by
fitting first 32k on the page like normal string (and handle it in memory
accordingly) and putting the rest in "normal" BLOB structures. We could call
this beast LONGVARCHAR/LONGVARBINARY depending on the content, and I guess
that would fit everybody's needs. Those who are lazy enough to define the
maximum length would declare columns as LONGVARCHAR, others would use our
old VARCHAR columns.

Roman