Eating it RAW

I am trying to store data into a LONG RAW column, and I am running into some difficulty.

The data I would like to store happens to be TIFF data. Consequently, it is a minimum of 4K or so in size. When I tried using HEXTORAW with an 8K string, I was told that my string was too long. So, I divided the string into a bunch of 254-character strings all concatenated. No parse error, but only the first 256 characters were stored anyway. This gives me only 128 bytes of raw data, which isn't quite enough.

So, is there another way to issue an INSERT that will allow me to store up to the full length of my LONG RAW?

Also, I noticed that when I fetch this column, the first byte seems to be the row number in the query. Does anyone know what this byte really means and what it's doing at the beginning of my raw data?

Thanks.

-- 
Michael J. Harper
mharper_at_well.sf.ca.us