MySQL Encryption

[FiRe]

What would you say is a reasonable size password for AES_ENCRYPT (how many chars?) and can it contain special chars or just A-Z,0-9? Also its storing in a blob column because its encrypted and returned in binary, whats the maximum length of plain text I can use to encrypt so that it will fit into a blob?

[lammert]

I think the main question is not what a reasonable length for a password is, but where you want to store it. If your plan is to program it hard in your script, then every length will do because everyone with access to your script will have access to the data. Otherwise, manually entered password are often about 8 characters, longer is more difficult to remember, and automatically generated random text strings are often 16 to 40 bytes long.