Store very long text: BLOB or TEXT

Question

I have several texts which are very long (tens of thousands of characters). Which is the best option to store such texts in SQLite: as TEXT or as BLOB ?

Answer 1

In SQLite's database file format, TEXT and BLOB values are stored in exactly the same way. The only difference is that the bytes of a TEXT value are assumed to be valid UTF-8.

Answer 2

Answer: TEXT

BLOB is good only for binary files and generally storing any binary data (images, songs, etc) in a database is not a good idea and is to be done only as a last resort.

Here is list of data types in SQLite and which data type from SQL are their corresponding ones:

• INTEGER – INT, INTEGER, TINYINT, SMALLINT, MEDIUMINT, BIGINT, UNSIGNED BIG INT, INT2, INT8
• TEXT – CHARACTER(20), VARCHAR(255), VARYING CHARACTER(255),NCHAR(55), NATIVE CHARACTER(70), VARCHAR(100), TEXT, CLOB
• BLOB (no datatype specified) – NONE
• REAL – REAL, DOUBLE, DOUBLE PRECISION, FLOAT
• NUMERIC – NUMERIC, DECIMAL(10,5), BOOLEAN, DATE, DATETIME

For a really good guide about SQLite refer to this guide.