Getting started with Toad for DB2: Chapter 7 - Lob Data

There are a few other basic things I'd like to go over with you for Toad for DB2. And everything we've gone over so far applies both for DB2 for LUW, that's Linux, UNIX, and Windows, as well as DB2 and z/OS or the mainframe. And, now, another thing that I think is important, a basic thing, is the ability for Toad to render some BLOB data. So here I have a table, an employee photo table. It's got a BLOB column on it. And, by default, Toad does not fetch BLOB columns. You could customize and say to do that. But I have not done that. So when you click on a column that is a LOB, Toad is going to prompt, are you sure you want to read it? Because it could be that your database is remote and it could be millions of bytes coming down the line for each row. So it's prompting you. So once you do say read LOBs, then you could actively click on your LOBs. And if Toad recognizes it as an image, it will actually display that image for you. So that's a pretty cool feature with Toad for DB2. And, also, I'm going to just put in a quick filter here. I think I have tables that contain another BLOB table. And this data contains a PDF file. So now, if I read those and then click on this, what we'll actually do is show-- we have a PDF file viewer as part of the pop-up. So you can actually see the contents of a PDF file. So it's a pretty slick mechanism here of rendering not only images but PDF files as well in the SQL Editor. All right, I'm going to clear of my filter, get back to here. And one thing you'll notice with Toad, pretty much in many places, is the right-click ability of many things. So if you right click on any object, it will bring up a list of actions that you can take off of that object. So, for example, I'm right-clicking on a table. I could create a table, clone the table, alter the table, drop it, et cetera. There's many, many actions you can take and they're all available via right-click. So if I wanted to, for example, create a table just like that one, I could very easily select Create Like and just give it a name and be able to very quickly and easily generate the DDL that creates a table just like the one I have selected.