* Check for module initialization failure (extremely rare)

* The MySQL FIELD_TYPE converter can now be a sequence of 2-tuples.
   Item 0 is a bit mask (using FLAG.*) which must be matched. This should
   be an integer. Item 1 is the conversion function. If item 0 is not an
   integer, then this function is considered the default converter for
   this FIELD_TYPE. Note that these tuples are considered when the query
   has been executed and the result is available, so it doesn't add a
   per-row overhead.

 * As a result of the above, BINARY BLOB fields are now returned as
   character arrays using the array.array class. Non-BINARY BLOB fields
   (i.e. TEXT) are returned as strings. If unicode is enabled, they are
   returned as unicode strings.

 * Bump version to 0.9.3b3.

MySQLdb/MySQLdb/__init__.py

@@ -20,7 +20,7 @@ version_info = (
     9,
     3,
     "beta",
-    2)
+    3)
 if version_info[3] == "final": __version__ = "%d.%d.%d" % version_info[:3]
 else: __version__ = "%d.%d.%d%1.1s%d" % version_info[:5]
 

MySQLdb/MySQLdb/connections.py

@@ -112,6 +112,7 @@ class Connection(ConnectionBase):
                 u = unicode
             conv[FIELD_TYPE.STRING] = u
             conv[FIELD_TYPE.VAR_STRING] = u
+            conv[FIELD_TYPE.BLOB].insert(-1, (None, u))
         self._make_connection(args, kwargs2)
         self.converter[types.StringType] = self.string_literal
         if hasattr(types, 'UnicodeType'):

MySQLdb/MySQLdb/converters.py

@@ -26,7 +26,7 @@ MySQL.connect().
 """
 
 from _mysql import string_literal, escape_sequence, escape_dict, escape, NULL
-from constants import FIELD_TYPE
+from constants import FIELD_TYPE, FLAG
 from sets import *
 from times import *
 from string import split
@@ -132,6 +132,10 @@ conversions = {
     FIELD_TYPE.DATETIME: DateTime_or_None,
     FIELD_TYPE.TIME: Time_or_None,
     FIELD_TYPE.DATE: Date_or_None,
+    FIELD_TYPE.BLOB: [
+        (FLAG.BINARY, char_array),
+        (None, None),
+    ],
     }