I've lately been storing generated binaries and small files in SQLite via base64 text and BLOB fields.

I note the claims by Django folks that it's 'not good practice' (which appears quite contrary to formal experimental verification, and possibly untrue unless you're network-bound).

Arguably they have a point with BLOBs. But I don't think I'll agree with the arguments against base64 storage: hey, it's just text. And I like it. It reduces filesystem management and I get a relational framework to manage metadata, rather than having to rely on the OS's filesystem, which often feels slow (especially in Windows).

This was also an interesting read on the history of Base64:

Your first mistake is thinking that ASCII encoding and Base64 encoding are interchangeable. They are not. They are used for different purposes.

• When you encode text in ASCII, you start with a text string and convert it to a sequence of bytes.

• When you encode data in Base64, you start with a sequence of bytes and convert it to a text string.

To understand why Base64 was necessary in the first place we need a little history of computing...