Roman Rokytskyy wrote:

>I think we talk about different things - you about physical page/disk
>access, I'm talking about the network.
>
>What I'm saying is that if I use blob, any access to the blob requires
>me to send three more messages over the wire. If you use Internet
>connection each message round to server and back will take, let's say,
>200 ms due to delays. Not nice.
>
>

A point well taken, and an another argument in favor of dropping BLR in
favor of a SQL based
protocol. For the uninitiated, BLR messages are fixed length,
precluding blob data. The restriction
could be lifted, but the impact through all of the plumbing is probably
more effort than a second
sub-protocol. This of course raised other interesting and important
architectural and philosophical
questions that go beyond the question in hand.

In Netfrastructure, I weakened the distinction between blobs and
character fields in the interface.
A clob (oh, yes, I'm afraid I use the heretical term) is interchangeable
with character fields in the
API and DML, and are transfered with other fields when a record (er,
row) is shipped over the
wire. The blobs and clobs can be referenced by getBytes/getString and
setBytes/setString or
getBlob/getClob and setBlob/setClob. The wire protocol, however, is the
independent of
the API calls.