My personal favorite database is PostgreSQL. In the time I started with it, it cold hold large objects, in my case images and still am very satisfied with it.

http://qatsi.ath.cx/cgi-bin/cath_pub?laatste is an example of it. The images shown are not retrieved directly from the database, but that’s another issue.

Creating new databases I wondered about the encoding to use and stumbled over this page: http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jdbc/2004-11/msg00075.php

So for now a reasonable encoding is utf8.