Teradata LOB Data Types - ODBC Driver for Teradata

ODBC Driver for Teradata® User Guide

Product
ODBC Driver for Teradata
Release Number
17.00
Published
June 2020
Language
English (United States)
Last Update
2020-08-22
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B035-2526
lifecycle
previous
Product Category
Teradata Tools and Utilities
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.