What’s the best ESE column type to XmlSerialize an object to my ESE DB?
Both “long binary” and “long ASCII text” work OK.
Reason for long binary: absolutely sure there’s no characters conversation.
Reason for long text: the XML is text.
It seems MSDN says the 2 types only differ when sorting and searching. Obviously I’m not going to create any indices over that column; fields that need to be searchable and/or sortable are stored in separate columns of appropriate types.
Is it safe to assume any UTF8 text, less then 2GB in size, can be saved to and loaded from the ESE “long ASCII text” column value?
Yes you can put up to 2GB of data of UTF8 text into any long text/binary column. The only difference between long binary and long text is the way that the data is normalized when creating an index over the column. Other than that ESE simply stores the provided bytes in the column with no conversion. ESE can only index ASCII or UTF16 data and it is the application’s responsibility to make sure the data is in the correct format so it would seem to be more correct to put the data into a long binary column. As you aren’t creating an index there won’t actually be any difference.
If you are running on Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 you should investigate column compresion. For XML data you might get significant savings simply by turning compression on.