title: Help me understand the difference between CLOBs and BLOBs in Oracle
body: <p>This is mainly just a "check my understanding" type of question.  Here's my understanding of CLOBs and BLOBs as they work in Oracle:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>CLOBs are for text like XML, JSON, etc.  You should not assume what encoding the database will store it as (at least in an application) as it will be converted to whatever encoding the database was configured to use.</li>
  <li>BLOBs are for binary data.  You can be reasonably assured that they will be stored how you send them and that you will get them back with exactly the same data as they were sent as.</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>So in other words, say I have some binary data (in this case a pickled python object).  I need to be assured that when I send it, it will be stored exactly how I sent it and that when I get it back it will be exactly the same.  A BLOB is what I want, correct?</p>
  
  <p>Is it really feasible to use a CLOB for this?  Or will character encoding cause enough problems that it's not worth it?</p>