From customer:

Provide support for basic HEX: Most of my data is numeric strings: eg: "1234567890", 8>16 digits, stored as char/cichar, but there is a huge 'waste' in the ascii-encoding and subsequent indexing (ignoring unicode and char-mapping) and I have been unable to knock up my own 'hex encoding scheme' to work with hex via ascii codes. I feel that if there was a simple, low overhead, I/O routine based on the RAW data type and giving HEX I/O I could reduce my table data size by a 3rd and halve my index ADI size too! (and significantly decrease index build/search time) I hope I could use a simple "&H" type prefix in the string and use such a string directly in selects and inserts. Other DBs do support it (MS-SQL/DB2) after a fashion, but the only hex I can find in ADS is in the GUID/newID process. The Hex I/O mode would also help manage GUIDs into low-ovehead bytes to reduce replication overheads. (any HEX I/O must be available via ADO/ADO.NET, I am happy to I/O in ASCII/ANSI as long as ADS works with 'bytes' internally)*. Working with HEX would open up all sorts of cypto-graphic possibiliies and other encoding tasks.