Using long raw

Hi

I'm using the Long Raw datatype because our needs are for fairly small binary storage (typically only a few K) and it is much more efficicient in the table than out. But - while i can store and return to my client applications the stored binary I wish to avoid storing the same binary twice. So i figure I will look for any binaries that have the same length and compare them with one to be saved before I actually save it otherwise I will simply point to the existing binary record. But how do I find the length of a long raw and then how do I compare them inside PL/SQL.

I have tried opening a cursor from DBMS_SQL then using the column_value_long function to retrieve the data in chunks but this seems to fail due to it being long raw rather than long.

Don't know what I am doing wrong but would really appreciate some help. Thanks in advance.

Don Received on Sun Oct 29 2000 - 21:16:36 CST