Comment 14 for bug 622194

Mark - it seems strange that you get only 1.2MB of a 10.7MB file. The documented (and observed by me!) behaviour of exceeding the max_allowed_packet size is that the BLOB is set to NULL. I've never seen any truncation.

<<But I can't "see" the contents of the BLOB to find out what's there or not.>>

How are you trying to look? In phpMyAdmin, there is a check-box for "show blob contents". Alternatively, try

SELECT LEFT(CONVERT(import_gedcom using 'utf8'), 1000) FROM wt_gedcom;