Oracle data type RAW and LONG RAW

The data types raw and long raw (as also blob) store a sequence of bytes.

The raw data type is similar to the varchar2 data type, but it is not subject to character conversion in Oracle Net or import/export utilities.

long raw stores binary data up to 2 GB.

long raw (as well as long) is horrible to manage, especially when their size is larger than 32 KB. Therefore, Oracle (and probably everybody else) recommends to use clob instead of long raw.

It should be noted that SQL functions do not operate on the raw datatype and that PL/SQL does not allow to overload functions between raw and char data types.

These limitations give raise to the utl_raw package with which RAWs can be manimpulated.

Packages related to the raw data types are: utl_raw and utl_i18n (for example the procedure utl_i18n.string_to_raw.

rawtohex

--
-- Determine hex representation of "Hello world"
--
select
  rawtohex(
    utl_raw.cast_to_raw('Hello world')
  ) hex
from
  dual;
  
-- 48656C6C6F20776F726C64

Github repository Oracle-Patterns, path: /SQL/datatypes/raw/rawtohex.sql

The return value of rawtohex is limited to 32767 bytes. Additional data is truncated.

Oracle data type RAW and LONG RAW

rawtohex

See also