[DUG] Blob primer

[Trevor Jones]

Firebird will let you read from and write to blobs as varchars (as long as
the blob is subtype text) even from within stored procedure and triggers.

AFAIK, IB still won't.

Trevor

-----Original Message-----
From: delphi-bounces at ns3.123.co.nz [mailto:delphi-bounces at ns3.123.co.nz] On
Behalf Of Paul McKenzie
Sent: Friday, 1 July 2005 8:47 a.m.
To: NZ Borland Developers Group - Delphi List
Subject: Re: [DUG] Blob primer

I don't know about firebird, but IB sux...
If you are using it for pure binary data e.g. Images etc. then there is not
much choice, and it is 
usable.
Subtypes are used for defining what type of Blob data eg. Text.
If you are trying to use Blobs for storing text - My advice - avoid this at
all costs!
Even though there is a subtype for text it is useless - we couldn't get SQL
to interpret the text.
I ended up writing a UDF to convert our blobs out into VarChars
There are various UDF's around for dealing with Blob Text - either buggy or
just don't work!
HTH.

Regards
Paul McKenzie
SMSS Ltd.
Wellington
New Zealand