Re: Newbie BLOB question

On Fri, 2006-11-17 at 11:39 -0800, debbie@diversifiedmetals.com wrote: > Thank you, Adam. > I'm no DBA so please bear with me. > > > > If so, how do you populate it? > > > > ? Via SQL? > > I figured, but I'm not clear on the syntax....what do you use to > populate and retrieve? (load, unload, what is filetoblob?..etc..) Both simple (BYTE/TEXT) and smart (BLOB/CLOB) large object get stored to and retrieved from a table like any data type: SELECT to retrieve, INSERT/UPDATE to store. The main problem with BYTE/TEXT is that there are no literals for values of these types, so you'd need a client language that can handle host variables. (This would be a good time for you to mention what programming language your application is or will be written in.) BLOB/CLOB types might not have native support in the client language of your choice, but at least for these you can use the functions LOTOFILE and FILETOBLOB to 'cast' back and forth between a BLOB object and a file, either on the client or server file system. (No such functions exist for BYTE/TEXT values.) See http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/idshelp/v10/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.sqls.doc/sqls1034.htm for more information on the smart-large-object functions. Hope this helps, Carsten.