> basically string stored in small binary blob, due to binary nature all needs to be converted to hex all the time for matching and readability, atrocious perfo

> basically string stored in small binary blob, due to binary nature all needs to be converted to hex all the time for matching and readability, atrocious performance on stored procedures But this give a significant performance benefit for storage (storing in the display format gives 4 bits per byte, or less if you include decorations like the '-' characters, rather than 8) and more importantly when joining (it doesn't need to convert for this, so on a 64-bit architecture each comparison is a pair of 64-bit compares in the CPU) rather than a more complex string comparison. If you are converting between string and binary representations more often than on input to your stored procedures or for output, then something is very wrong (the query planner are likely not able to use indexes that it could too, so scanning instead of seeking).