Hi,

I wish to extract just the first 1024 bytes of a stored blob and not the whole file. The reason for this is I want to just extract the metadata from a file as quickly as possible without having to select the whole blob.

I understand the following:

select dbms_lob.substr(file_blob, 16,1) from file_upload where file_upload_id=504;

which returns it as hex. How may I do this so it returns it in binary data without selecting the whole blob?

Thanks in advance.