base64 encode in MySQL

Question

I want to select a blob col from one table, base64 encode it and insert it into another tables. Is there any way to do this without round tripping the data out of the DB and

Answer 1

For those interested, these are the only alternatives so far:

1) Using these Functions:

http://wi-fizzle.com/downloads/base64.sql

2) If you already have the sys_eval UDF, (Linux) you can do this:

sys_eval(CONCAT("echo '",myField,"' | base64"));

The first method is known to be slow. The problem with the second one, is that the encoding is actually happening "outside" MySQL, which can have encoding problems (besides the security risks that you are adding with sys_* functions).

Unfortunately there is no UDF compiled version (which should be faster) nor a native support in MySQL (Posgresql supports it!).

It seems that the MySQL development team are not interested in implement it as this function already exists in other languages, which seems pretty silly to me.