> Typical databases compress rows or columns anyway these days; or if they don't, then the storage does. So often the question is entropy not character count. F

> Typical databases compress rows or columns anyway these days; or if they don't, then the storage does. So often the question is entropy not character count. For example storage I work with these days takes as an identical number of bytes to store a hex string as to store the same id as a byte array.mo Storage tends to be cheap, so it's less about that, and more about memory consumption and index efficiency. The cost of transforming back to and from binary is also pretty trivial on modern systems.