Character Large Object - SQL data type used to store character strings longer than the regular CHAR and VARCHAR types allow.
Character Large Object - SQL data type intended to store character strings longer than the regular CHAR and VARCHAR types handle.
See also NCLOB data type which is recommended for storing National Character strings/Unicode.
Oracle: CLOBs are stored externally and are referenced from table, so using them involves performance hit in comparison to using VARCHAR2. In exchange they have very high size limits, depending on exact version of RDBMS but not smaller than 2 GB.
Main difference between CLOB and BLOB data type is that CLOB has defined character encoding and to limited extent can be compared to strings, indexed and searched.
