Mongodrdl: unsupported Mongo type: "bson.Binary" / unsupported SQL type: "binary"

Working with Data Connectors & Integrations
1

I want to use the BI Connector to access the documents in tabular form. In general this works very nice. The only downfall is lack of support for Binary fields. I have yet to find any information on this problem. Is this technically not possible or not supported for a specific reason? is it planned to be supported in the future?

The only hint I’ve found is in the release notes stating

mongodrdl ignores binary fields when generating DRDL files.
(https://docs.mongodb.com/bi-connector/current/release-notes/#bi-2.0.2)

When Binary fields are present in documents they are simply omitted. If you try to map them using a custom schema you get errors. For example:

      MongoType: bson.Binary
      SqlType: binary

and

      MongoType: bson.Binary
      SqlType: varchar

resulting in errors

...unable to create database "..." from drdl: unable to create table "..." from drdl: unable to create column "binary_data" from drdl: unsupported Mongo type: "bson.Binary" on column "binary_data"

or respectively

... unsupported SQL type: "binary" on column "binary_data" ...
2

by the way, the workaround for now is to simply store the binary in a UTF-8 string field. The downside being that it takes up more space than really needed.