BLOB Full Form

BLOB stands for Binary Large Object. It is defined as the chunk of binary data being stored as a single entity in a database system. BLOBs are used primarily to hold multimedia objects like images, videos, and sound, though they can also be used to store programs. Not all DBMS’s support BLOBs.

There are clouds available that provides a service as BLOB storage, that supports the storage of large amounts of unstructured object data, such as text or binary data. eg- Azure Blob storage.

History

Jim Starkey, was the inventor of the BLOB, and it first came into existence in the 1970s. Name BLOB came in existence much earlier before the acronym could actually be stated what it is today i.e Binary large object. In 1997, Starkey explained that BLOB was used as an acronym because at that time it was unrecognizable (or unprofessional) for the market.

Characteristics

• Data type used to store binary data such as images or other multimedia files.
• They require significantly large storage space in comparison to other data types.
• Database types decide the amount of data that can be stored by BLOBs.
• Blob storage is of three types:
  • Block BLOBs: Used for text or binary files, documents and media files.
  • Append BLOBs: Same as Block, but optimized for append operations.
  • Page BLOBs: Storage upto 1TB, and more efficient for I/O operations.

Advantages

• BLOBs are good alternative for adding large binary files to DBs.
• Database backup contains all the data.
• BLOBs are one of the best cost effective way.
• Database size reduces, as BLOB storage uses compact DBs.

Disadvantages

• BLOBs are not universal in terms of Databases(DBs), i.e. not all DBs supports them.
• BLOBs are inefficient as more disk space and response time is required.
• BLOB storage doesn’t allow the DB monitoring.
• Added overheads are required in order to secure the BLOB storage used.