At 09:37 PM 25/03/2003 +1100, you wrote:

>I'm worried too if I've been doing the wrong thing.. but I think that after
>5 years with no unpredicatble results, I need some more convincing that I'm
>doing something wrong.

If you have been *updating* blobs by passing them as parameters to SPs for
5 years, I think that takes us back to IB 5.1, where (I'm told) the
documentation was changed to say that you couldn't pass blobs as SP
parameters. This was because of a bug -- that I believe is still present
in IB 6.0 -- where the blob_id's could get scrambled in record versions and
the same blob_id could end up referring to two different blobs.

I'm pretty sure the fix for this happened very early in the Firebird betas.

FYI, there is no such thing as "updating a blob". What really happens is
that an entirely new blob is created --- with a new blob_id --- and the
original disappears.

And, Thomas S., I'm aware that the UFB duplicates the documentation error
from the IB 6 docs. It fell off my "fix list" for v.1.1 but it has gone in
for the next review.

I'm pretty sure that it's still invalid to use comparison operators on
pairs of blobs, i.e. if blob_a <> blob_b, etc. I think you still need to
use a BlobCompare UDF.

heLen