> Your right, it is interesting from an academic point of view. As
> I've stated at the top of the email the decision to go with a 32k
> varchar rather than stick with the blob fields is purely a speed
> solution when running over their VPN connection. Blob fields in that
> situation sucked. Plain and simple.

Are you aware that due to RLE compression algorithm used by Firebird for
storing rows on disk even empty string stored into VARCHAR(32000)
field will occupy 500 bytes ? (and thus only few rows will fit onto
database page which can drastically reduce preformance)

You can find some notes here:
http://www.volny.cz/iprenosil/interbase/ip_ib_strings.htm

Have you considered storing data in blob and convert them
to varchar using UDF for reading ?

Ivan