Storing Certificates on a database - anything better than serialization?

I'd like to implement a certificate store as a database table (it's a set of locally generated certificates where the private key is issued to authorized users).

The obvious way is to serialize the ceritificates and store them in a VARBInary field but it's unapealingly innefient (fixed overheads on serialiized streams being quite high in this case).

Is there a more structured way?

[405 byte] By [malcolmmca] at [2007-11-27 9:44:08]