Changing Table Structures - Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 for Effective MySQL Management - page 100

If we put a check mark for the Show BLOB display option, we now see the following
in the BLOB field:
To really see the image from within phpMyAdmin, refer to Chapter 16.
The $cfg['ProtectBinary'] parameter controls what can be done while editing
binary fields ( BLOB s and any other field with the binary attribute). The default
value blob blocks the BLOB fields from being edited but allows us to edit other fields
marked binary by MySQL. A value of all would block even binary fields from being
edited. A value of FALSE would protect nothing, thus allowing us to edit all the fields.
If we try the last choice, we see the following in the Edit panel for this row:
There are chances that this is not our favorite image editor! In fact, data may be
corrupted even if we save this row without touching the BLOB field. But the
possibility of setting $cfg['ProtectBinary'] to FALSE exists, as some users put
text in their BLOB fields, and they need to be able to modify this text.
MySQL BLOB data types are actually similar to their corresponding TEXT data
types. However, we should keep in mind that a BLOB has no character set, whereas
a TEXT column has a character set that impacts sorting and comparison. This is why
phpMyAdmin can be configured to allow editing of BLOB fields.
ENUM and SET
Both these field types are intended to represent a list of possible values. The difference
is that the user can choose only one value from a defined list of values with ENUM ,
and more than one value with SET . With SET , all the multiple values go into one cell;
but multiple values do not imply the creation of more than one row of data.