What are LOBs, BLOBs, and CLOBs

Overview

When you work with data, one challenge you might face is moving large objects between the client application and the database server. In some scenarios, you might be able to treat largeobject data just like any other data, but in many cases you might be forced to look at alternative approaches.

Chapter 7 and Chapter 8 both contain an example of reading employee photos from the Northwind database and displaying a photo in a Windows DataGridView or Web GridView control. These chapters include sample code for storing the photo to disk, as well as uploading a photo from a disk file to the database. These samples function properly with the small photos in the database, but if the photos were large and you wanted to simply read the photos and write them to a disk file using the least amount of memory, you would be better off using streaming techniques to handle the data in chunks.

Note that if you know the maximum size of your data and it's acceptable to load all of this data into memory, you don't need to use streaming techniques to access the data. This chapter explores the reading and writing of large objects using streaming techniques, as well as examples of retrieving and storing large objects.