BLOB or CLOB

[edsperez]

What's the difference between BLOB and CLOB?

[sambavan]

CLOB is similar to the oracle 7 long type, a clob can hold single-byte character data.

NCLOB stores fixed-width multibyte national character set data.

BLOB is similar to oracle & lon raw type, a BLOB can hold unstructred binary data.You can store and retrieve the data
piecewise.

BFIlEs allow read-only access to large binary files stored outside the oracle database.Unlike other three LOB types, BFile data is stored in a seperate file that is not maintained by oracle.Manipulations to BFILE data do not participate in oracle transactions.They can not be committed or rolled back.

store text as an image-use BLOB
store text- use CLOB


Curtesy to Oracle Forums, Metalink.

Sam

[jdorlon]

To help you remeber the distictionion, look at the first letter -

CLOB - C = Character
BLOB - B = Binary
NCLOB - N = National (Guess what C is?)

[edsperez]

Suppose I am using the UTF8 Character set, do I need to use NCLOB instead of CLOB?

Thanks,

Ed