The driver allows you to retrieve LONGVARBINARY data, using JDBC methods designed for Binary Large Objects (BLOBs). When using these methods to update long data as BLOBs, the updates are made to the local copy of the data contained in the BLOB object.
Retrieving and updating long data using JDBC methods designed for BLOBs provides some of the same benefits as retrieving and updating BLOBs, such as:
Provides random access to data
Allows searching for patterns in the data
To provide the benefits normally associated with BLOBs, data must be cached. Because data is cached, your application will incur a performance penalty, particularly if data is read once sequentially. This performance penalty can be severe if the size of the long data is larger than available memory.
Provides random access to data