Binary large object (BLOB) data in Sybase IQ is stored in columns of data type LONG BINARY or BLOB.
An individual LONG BINARY data value can have a length ranging from zero (0) to 512TB (terabytes) for an IQ page size of 128KB, or 2PB (petabytes) for an IQ page size of 512KB. (The maximum length is equal to 4GB multiplied by the database page size.) To accommodate a table with LONG BINARY data, an IQ database must be created with an IQ page size of at least 128KB (131072 bytes).
A table or database can contain any number of LONG BINARY columns up to the supported maximum columns per table and maximum columns per database, respectively.
LONG BINARY columns can be either NULL or NOT NULL and can store zero-length values. The domain BLOB is a LONG BINARY data type that allows NULL.
You cannot construct a non-FP index or join index on a LONG BINARY column.
Prefetching is disabled if the result set contains BLOB columns.
Modify LONG BINARY columns using the UPDATE, INSERT, LOAD TABLE, DELETE, TRUNCATE, SELECT...INTO and INSERT...LOCATION SQL statements. Positioned updates and deletes are not supported on LONG BINARY columns.
You can insert an Adaptive Server Enterprise IMAGE column into a LONG BINARY column using the INSERT...LOCATION command. All IMAGE data inserted is silently right-truncated at 2147483648 bytes (2GB).
There are no implicit data type conversions from the LONG BINARY data type to another non-LONG BINARY data type, except to the BINARY and VARBINARY data types for INSERT and UPDATE. There are implicit conversions to LONG BINARY data type from TINYINT, SMALLINT, INTEGER, UNSIGNED INTEGER, BIGINT, UNSIGNED BIGINT, CHAR, and VARCHAR data types. There are no implicit conversions from BIT, REAL, DOUBLE, or NUMERIC data types to LONG BINARY data type. Implicit conversion can be controlled using the CONVERSION_MODE database option.
The currently supported byte substring functions for the LONG BINARY data type are accepted as input for implicit conversion for the INSERT and UPDATE statements. See Chapter 9, “Function Support.”
The LONG BINARY data type can be explicitly converted to BINARY or VARBINARY. No other explicit data type conversions (for example, using the CAST or CONVERT function) exist either to or from the LONG BINARY data type.
Truncation of LONG BINARY data during conversion of LONG BINARY to BINARY or VARBINARY is handled the same way the truncation of BINARY and VARBINARY data is handled. If the STRING_RTRUNCATION option is ON, any right-truncation (of any values, not just non-space characters) on INSERT or UPDATE of a binary column results in a truncation error and the transaction is rolled back.
