BLOB handling in Oracle

(I just started reading the group, but the problem is urgent---please don't flame me if it is a FAQ).

I looked to all Oracle manuals to find some hints how one should handle BLOBs with Oracle (LONG RAW datatype), but only found the standard paragraphs over and over again (no functions, no indexing, ...).

What I need to have is some method to get the size of the field on a fetch, allocate the memory, and do the actual fetch in the tailor-made buffer for the field---IMHO this is the only way to deal with fields that can grow as big as LONG RAW (all other solutions would only impose artificial limits).

I heard other RDBMSes provide such solutions, but I couldn't find anything for Oracle. Storing the length of the BLOB into an extra field doesn't count, as other applications will be using the database. This would be redundant anyway, while Oracle has this size information; at least, that is what I understood from the DBA guide.

My problem pertains to v6 and v7, the latter being the more important.

If anyone got a hint, please reply per E-Mail, I'll summarize.

Thanks

Cees

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Cees de Groot, Lake of Konstanz, Germany 
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