The Teradata support contains two large object column types:
- BLOB – A variable-length binary string
- CLOB – A variable length character string
A BLOB is stored in the client system format and no translation occurs between the client and the server. A CLOB has a server side character set of Latin, Unicode® or Kanji. CLOBs are stored in the Teradata internal character format and translation occurs on the server.
Before the Teradata Native LOB Support was introduced, it was not possible to store really large objects in a database. In some instances, VARBYTE and VARCHAR data types, which are variable length with a maximum length of 64000 bytes, were sometimes used to work around this limitation.