Chapter 33. Large Objects

Table of Contents

33.1. Introduction
33.2. Implementation Features
33.3. Client Interfaces
33.3.1. Creating a Large Object
33.3.2. Importing a Large Object
33.3.3. Exporting a Large Object
33.3.4. Opening an Existing Large Object
33.3.5. Writing Data to a Large Object
33.3.6. Reading Data from a Large Object
33.3.7. Seeking in a Large Object
33.3.8. Obtaining the Seek Position of a Large Object
33.3.9. Truncating a Large Object
33.3.10. Closing a Large Object Descriptor
33.3.11. Removing a Large Object
33.4. Server-Side Functions
33.5. Example Program

LightDB has a large object facility, which provides stream-style access to user data that is stored in a special large-object structure. Streaming access is useful when working with data values that are too large to manipulate conveniently as a whole.

This chapter describes the implementation and the programming and query language interfaces to LightDB large object data. We use the libpq C library for the examples in this chapter, but most programming interfaces native to LightDB support equivalent functionality. Other interfaces might use the large object interface internally to provide generic support for large values. This is not described here.