Choosing Blob Segment Size
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A Blob is a data type with an unbounded size. It can be many megabytes in size, much larger than any database interface can handle in a single I/O transfer. Therefore, Blobs are defined as a series of segments of uniform size, and the I/O interface transfers Blobs one segment at a time.
Blobs are a special case because there is a special Blob page type, on which other data types cannot be stored. The data page for a record containing a Blob stores a Blob ID, which indicates which Blob page the Blob is stored on. A Blob is stored on the same page as the primary record version, if it fits. If it does not fit on that page, special pages are allocated for the Blob–as many as are required–and an index is stored on the primary page. Blob pages are never shared; either a Blob is on a normal data page, or it has a page to itself.
It is advantageous to define a Blob with a segment size equal to the page size. If both the page size and the Blob segment size are 4096 bytes, queries of large Blobs can achieve a data transfer rate of up to 20MB per second. InterBase ceases to be any kind of bottleneck in this situation; it is more likely that the hardware I/O bus, the network bandwidth, or the middleware are the limiting factors for throughput.