Based on our testing, you should not use Oracle’s VARCHAR2 data type to store binary data. The VARCHAR2 data type is intended for text data. If binary data is used with the VARCHAR2 data type, Oracle performs an automatic conversion on the binary data and one of the results is that data is truncated during archival retrieval. Future versions of Oracle may work differently, but at this time, VARCHAR2 is not suitable for storing binary CAR data in an Oracle database.
| Note | The approach of using multiple VARCHAR rows worked previously with DB2 and was used because some versions of DB2 did not support BLOB. This approach, however, may not be a good long term solution. It may also be less efficient in terms of total storage since it requires multiple, redundant rows in the CARTABLE. |
Oracle supports and recommends the BLOB type for binary data and now recommends using BLOB rather than long raw for storing binary data.
We have verified that Documaker's ODBC driver works with BLOBs and Oracle. We have tested this on Windows and also on UNIX using the DataDirect for UNIX ODBC driver.
Since the current Oracle Insurance UNIX native Oracle driver only supports long raw, We recommend using ODBC on Windows or UNIX for BLOB support.
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