In IBO I only deal with BLOB columns as strings yet I've been dealing with
them via the segmented semantics. I would really like to know how to deal
with them in the stream semantics rather than segmented.

Could you kindly share the needful information on this?

Thanks,
Jason Wharton
InterBase Developer Initiative
jwharton@...

InterBase will be the database of the new millennium.


-----Original Message-----
From: Ann Harrison <harrison@...>
To: IB-Architect@egroups.com <IB-Architect@egroups.com>
Date: Saturday, May 06, 2000 1:25 PM
Subject: Re: [IB-Architect] Database names: Hair trigger

>Jim Starkey said:
>
>>For the record, I don't think blob segments have proven their worth.
>>Can anybody think of any good reason to keep them part of the
>>architecture?
>
>What he did not say is that there are two different types of blob,
>segmented and stream. The segmented blobs are stored with a binary
>segment length. You can store a segment of any length, but when
>you retrieve it, the engine will never give you more than one
>segment at a time. Stream blobs are stored as a stream of bytes.
>When you store into one, you send some number of bytes. When you
>retrieve data from a stream blob, you get the smaller of the
>remaining bytes in the blob or a full buffer.
>
>No one has ever seen a stream blob (except fancied up
>as an array) because the documentation group was swamped with new
>features and decided to cut some. (V3) If stream blobs were
>available and documented, nobody would use segmented blobs
>
>People, including me, used text segmented blobs in two ways.
>Since each line was a segment, I often saw no reason to store
>the line terminator. But not always.
>
>Nobody would be that dumb today, but the fact remains that it is
>possible to infer semantic content from segment length. Which is
>a reason to leave them around, but push stream blobs instead.
>
>Ann
>
>
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