Question

I’ve noticed that in “SQL Developer” if you are selecting from a table that contains BLOBs, it uses the word “(BLOB)” instead of displaying / downloading the BLOB contents.

Is this something that can be done at a session level?

I have a .net program that does “select * from TABLE_WITH_BLOB” which returns the contents of the BLOB. I cannot change the program from selecting all columns, so the next best thing is to tell .net or the session to not transfer BLOBs. Anyone know a way of doing this?

Answer 1

No, SQL Developer is presumably building and running a dynamic select statement by inspecting the table definition, and for BLOB columns it simply substitutes the literal ‘(BLOB)’ something like this:

v_sql := 'SELECT col1, col2, col3, ''(BLOB)'' as blob_col FROM mytable';

Your .net program would have to do something similar to avoid receiving the BLOB data.