what type of data is allowed for blob? Is it only 0's and 1's as the name implies. but I am able to insert 0-9 and a-f through sql* plus. why is it so?
Its not restricted to 0's and 1's but its the way they are stored. 0-9 and a-f can also be represented in 0's and 1's form and stored in that fashion.
thanks for the reply, I am unable to insert data other than 0-9 and a-f into BLOB, as it is giving 'ORA-00911: invalid character' message. So does it only allow Hexadecimal numbers. If so, why it is allowing Hexadecimal numbers when it's name is Binary LOB? And one more thing when I take a word document as InputStream through JDBC and insert it into BLOB how I am able to insert word document into BLOB, as word document contains characters other than 0-9 and a-f. I am not getting low level clarity as how data is managed in BLOB, can you give some clarity on this.
Actually it allows the characters represented in the Hex form and not only the Hex characters. Even Z can be represented as binary value and has a Hex equivalent. Because there is a relation between Hex and binary and hex is just a way to represent binary data in a convenient manner. Because you are representing each bytes into binary values.