Question

The whole point of designating data as binary is to simply treat the binary sequence as a raw, untouched sequence of bytes.

=> Given that MySQL has BLOB, BINARY and VARBINARY data types, why isn’t it possible to store and retrieve any arbitrary binary stream of data from a php script without having the need to escape the sequence with mysql_real_escape_string or addslashes?

Answer 1

Because binary data are still serialized to a string… So, for example, imagine your $binary_data had the value a 'b" c. Then the query INSERT INTO foo VALUES $binary_data would fail.