oracle blob text search

Question

Is it possible to search through blob text using sql statement? I can do select * from $table where f1 like '%foo%' if the f1 is varchar, how about f1 is a blob? Any counter part for this?

Answer 1

If you are storing plain text it should be a CLOB, not a BLOB, and then you can still query using LIKE. A BLOB contains binary data that Oracle doesn't know the structure of, so it cannot search it in this way.

Answer 2

If it is a Word or PDF document, look into Oracle Text.