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Q&A What's the better way to store base64 in SQLite Database?

The question seems to show a certain level of confusion about terminology. I shall address what I believe to be the underlying question: How can I store binary data in SQLite? SQLite supports 5 da...

posted 3y ago by Peter Taylor‭

Answer
#1: Initial revision by user avatar Peter Taylor‭ · 2021-09-24T08:46:55Z (about 3 years ago)
The question seems to show a certain level of confusion about terminology. I shall address what I believe to be the underlying question: **How can I store binary data in SQLite?**

[SQLite supports 5 datatypes](https://www.sqlite.org/datatype3.html): NULL, INTEGER, REAL, TEXT, and BLOB. The natural datatype to use for binary data is BLOB. However, I assume that this is what you mean by *bitmap* when you say "*I don't want to use bitmap*".

That leaves text encodings. Note that

> The value is a text string, stored using the database encoding (UTF-8, UTF-16BE or UTF-16LE)

so the most efficient text encoding to use depends on the database configuration.

If the database is using UTF-8 then the optimal encoding would be base-128 using codepoints \u0000 to \u007f. If for some reason you want to avoid certain codepoints, binary base encoding is fastest when it can work with blocks, i.e. with bases whose base-2 logarithm is just more than a fraction whose numerator is a small multiple of 8. E.g. if `lg b = (8n + epsilon)/d` you can encode a block of `n` bytes as a block of `d` bytes for efficiency `n/d`. That gives the following good bases:

    Base b     lg b         Efficiency
       41    16.03 / 3         0.67
       49    56.15 / 10        0.70
       53    40.10 / 7         0.71
       57    64.16 / 11        0.72
       64    24.00 / 4         0.75
       75    56.06 / 9         0.78
       85    32.05 / 5         0.80
      102    40.03 / 6         0.83
      116    48.01 / 7         0.86
      128    56.00 / 8         0.88

So basically you want to pick the highest base which gives you enough codepoints in the range \u0000 to \u007f which you deem acceptable.

If the database is using UTF-16 then the basic principles are the same but you have the complication of working around the surrogate codepoints. I would avoid this if at all possible.