You can store a smart large object directly in a column that has
one of the following data types:
The CLOB data type holds text data.
The BLOB data type can store any kind of binary data in an undifferentiated
byte stream.
The CLOB or BLOB column holds an LO handle for the smart large
object. Therefore, when you select a CLOB or BLOB column, you do not
obtain the actual data of the smart large object, but the LO handle
that identifies this data. The BLOB and CLOB data types have identical
internal representation. Externally, an LO handle is represented as
a flat array of bytes with a length of MI_LO_SIZE.
Suppose an employee table has a BLOB column named emp_picture to
hold the picture of an employee. The following figure shows that in
a row of the employee table, the emp_picture column
contains an LO handle. This LO handle contains information about the
location of the actual employee picture in the sbspace1_100 sbspace. Figure 1: A smart large object in
a database column
The CLOB and BLOB data types are often referred to collectively
as smart-large-object data types.
