Thanks for the input... I'll stew on a graphic color representation, interesting idea. Originally I had set out to display what you get when you right click a hex on the map in game. In developing the page I had the current relative tensions displayed as fractions but these won't mean much to most (values like 0.05, 0.93..etc...).
The politics page now only displays the relations of playable races and does not report the relation of a race to itself.
The blobs in the SQL db are a holdover from the flatfile database engine in SFC. Most games save their data in binary format like SFC does, yes - it is the most efficient. (Civ III and Age of Empires II savegames are binary). However, modern game servers like Eve probably store all their data in MySQL or Oracle databses - but when you come right down to it, MySQL and Oracle save their data as binary on disk as well...)