Strange sizes of my BLOBs

G'day netfolks,

First, I'm a newbie... Please bear with me...

Second, I've got at question about BLOBs...

Okidoki, the story;
I've got an application residing on a Lotus Domino server which is using an Oracle server for data storage (using DECS from Domino). Everything look OK from inside the application, buuuut, when I was about to check that my RichText field in the Lotus Notes form was really saved into the row in the Oracle server I saw some strange sizes of the BLOB column.
Ok, so I've got an table containing some columns, and one of them is a BLOB column. This column is matching my RichText field in the Domino application. So far so good.
Ok, so I attached a MS Word document to my RT field, and I expected my BLOB column to grow in size. But to my surpise, the BLOB column stated it used 13041 bytes of data (using DBMS_LOB.GETLENGTH). The funny thing is, the attachment was a 16MB zipped file. Well, the users doesn't notice anything, because they see the attachment from Notes, but is it really stored in the Oracle database?
I've heard of some really awesome compression algorithms, but, compressing 16MB compressed ZIP data down to 13041 bytes is really too much...

That's the story, what's my question then; Well, is there any way I could verify that my attachment is really stored in the Oracle database? Ok, I guess I could write a C program which opens the BLOB and then saves it to a file on the client, and if I can run WinZip on it, I'm OK?
But, surely, there must be a way to verify the real size of the BLOB without actually extracting the contents?

Well, any pointers or answers are greatly appriciated.

Regards,
Andreas Almroth Received on Tue Aug 10 1999 - 16:49:27 CDT