Question

As I was going through the documentation of SQLite DB I found two things that don’t digest to me:

1. I saw it got a data type BLOB . So any one please explain what is the real use of this data type?

2. Then I found out it got Date And Time Functions , But i was not able use this in a successful way. i didn’t grab it’s main purpose also SQLITE doesn’t got a datatype for date so how this will work with SQlite ??

So please somebody help to understand this.

Answer 1

1. BLOBs are designed to store binary data.
   They behave much like strings, but can store any data, such as zero bytes, or byte sequences that would not be valid UTF-8 data.

   You use BLOBs to store images, audio data, or just any kind of data that isn’t a valid string.

2. As explained on the data types page, SQLite indeed does not have a separate date/time data type, but instead stores date/time values as strings or numbers.
   The data/time functions accept any string or number in such a format.

   To store a date in a SQLite database, use some SQLite function that returns a date (such as date('now') or current_timestamp), or just construct a string in the correct yyyy-mm-dd... format (or a day or seconds number).
   Such values can then be used with these date/time functions.

   If you don’t ever want to use SQLite’s built-in date/time functions, you also could use any other format to store dates/times.