Large objects (LOBs) considerations

Use LOBs with IBM i Access ODBC to store and access large text documents.

Large objects (LOBs):

Large object (LOB) data types allow applications to store large data objects as strings. The ODBC driver can access LOBs that are up to 2 GB in size.

When uploading large LOB data fields to the server, it is recommended that you use the SQLParamData and SQLPutData APIs. The SQLPutData API sends the LOB data to the server as it is received and reduces the amount of memory needed on the client.

LOB data types:

BLOB: Binary large data objects
CLOB: Single-byte large character data objects
DBCLOB: Double-byte character large data objects

To view an example that uses the BLOB data type:

See the Example: Use the BLOB data type topic below.

For more information on LOBs:

See the Using large objects topic under the Using the Object-Relational Capabilities heading in the SQL Programming Concepts topic in IBM Documentation.

DataLinks:

DataLink data types allow you to store many types of data in a database. Data is stored as a uniform resource locator (URL). The URL points to an object, which might be an image file, sound file, text file, and so forth.

For more information on DataLinks:: See the Using DataLinks topic under the Processing special data types heading in the SQL Programming Concepts topic in IBM Documentation.