Smart large objects

A smart large object is a data type that stores large, non-relational data objects such as images, sound clips, documents, graphics, maps and other large objects, and allows you to perform read, write, and seek operations on those objects.

Smart large objects consist of the CLOB (character large object) and BLOB (binary large object) data types. The CLOB data type stores large objects of text data. The BLOB data type stores large objects of binary data in an undifferentiated byte stream. A smart large object is stored in a particular type of database space called an sbspace. For information about creating and administering sbspaces, see your HCL® OneDB® Administrator's Guide.

The end of this section presents an example program called create_clob. The create_clob sample program demonstrates how to create a new smart large object from the HCL OneDB ESQL/C program, insert data into a CLOB column of the stores7 database, and then select the smart-large-object data back from this column.

For more information about the CLOB and BLOB data types, as well as other SQL data types, see the HCL OneDB Guide to SQL: Reference.

The information in these topics apply only if you are using HCL OneDB as your database server.

These topics describe the following information about programming with smart large objects:
  • Data structures for smart large objects
  • Creating a smart large object
  • Accessing a smart large object
  • Obtaining the status of a smart large object
  • Altering a smart-large-object column
  • Reading and writing smart large objects on an optical disc
  • The HCL OneDB ESQL/C API for smart large objects