Use Large Object data types for data that requires more than 32K in storage.
- Large object data types store ASCII (TEXT/CLOB) and binary (IMAGE/BLOB) data. Each BLOB/CLOB cell of data is stored on one or more pages:
- Assuming the page size is 128K
- If the data is 129K, it will require 2 pages to store the
information
- If the data is 1K, it will require 1 page to store the data
- In either case, the page(s) are compressed on disk into multiples of
the block size
- Can be used to store binary or text based objects
- Extends the long binary data type from a maximum size of 6K to an
unlimited size
- The TEXT index is the only viable index
- Can be fully searched with the TEXT index and its search
capabilities
- Special function to return the size of an object
(byte_length64)
- Special function to return portions of the object, not the entire
contents (byte_substr64)
- Can extract contents of a binary object cell to an individual file with
the BFILE() function