Tiny Tweak: BINARY and VARBINARY
The things that might change in future versions for the BINARY and VARBINARY data types are:
* We’ll drop the last vestiges of the idea that they’re not really data types, that they’re just variants of char/varchar data types. The product has some quirks that reflect that old idea, but it will no longer be tenable after the next version of the SQL standard says firmly: they’re data types. This will affect, for example, some connectors.
* The result of some functions will cease to be VARBINARY. For example if you say
CREATE TABLE xm AS SELECT CONCAT(’a',0);
SHOW CREATE TABLE tm;
you’ll see that the result of concatenating a char with an integer is a varbinary. But we now feel that a more useful result data type would be char or varchar with the connection character set.
* We’ll allow BINARY VARYING as an equivalent for VARBINARY in definitions.
* We’ll allow X’AB’ ‘CD’ as an equivalent for X’ABCD’ in literals.
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