I will give more insight about the problem: The application is high-end product used by top professional people in this particular industry. It is used to control a defined-set of hardware switches, gauges and controls associated with single flow of data. This single flow of data contains ~600 distinctive real values that can be modified by both moving the switches and the controls using the application or by the external hardware controls. Once all these values are set they are saved as a single setup for this particular single flow of data. This is called a 'preset'. We can save a number of different presets for the same flow of data. On top of this there could be a number of different flows of data for other logical components. Focusing on the single 'preset' - traditionally we managed this data in an XML string, that was eventually saved to the database. This was not very effective, as it demand that in each modification of any value, this XML-string will be rebuilt re-saved in the database. My current task is to move the 'preset' data format from XML-string to SQL data types, that can be more easily viewed and edited. For this I considered the followings:<br> 1. Use BLOB to hold the array of real values,<br> 2. Create a dedicated table that has one column per real value (hence ~600 columns),<br> 3. Leave things as they are today - use a string <br> Hope this clarifies the motivation