The BINARY and VARBINARY data types allows storage of binary strings.

A binary string is a sequence of octets (or bytes). Binary strings are distinguished from character strings in two ways. First, binary strings specifically allow storing octets of value zero and other “non-printable” octets (usually, octets outside the decimal range 32 to 126). Character strings disallow zero octets, and also disallow any other octet values and sequences of octet values that are invalid according to the database's selected character set encoding. Second, operations on binary strings process the actual bytes, whereas the processing of character strings depends on locale settings. In short, binary strings are appropriate for storing data that the programmer thinks of as “raw bytes”, whereas character strings are appropriate for storing text.

BINARY and VARBINARY literals are specified by string literals of hexadecimal digits with an x prefix: x'45F0AB'. Such a literal must have an even number of characters, and all characters must be legal hexadecimal digits. A multi-part literal can be specified as the concatenation of multiple literals, e.g.: x'AB' 'CD'.

Converting a string to a binary value produces a binary value containing the bytes of the encoding of the characters of the string.

Binary values support bitwise operations, although there is no syntax yet to express these operations. They can be aggregated using the aggregation functions BIT_AND, BIT_OR, and BIT_XOR.