Handling a BLOB (zip file) called from MySQL

I am trying to figure out how to best handle a record that contains a zip file (BLOB) in MySQL. When I call it out from the table, is the best way to handle the file by writing it to a temporary directory? The BLOB represents a '.zip' file, so should I be using: zip_open /zip_read / zip_close when loading and retrieving the file to/from the data table? Or would fopen and such in binary mode be sufficient? I don't need to open the zip file and see what is inside per se - just want to store into the data table and pull it out as a file that can be downloaded. :) Thanks! -Mike